Kerouac, Jack

Ink, pencil, and brown, blue, green, orange, and red colored pencil and wax crayon on leaf from a spiral-bound sketch pad (9 x 11 7/8 in; 229 x 303 mm), [San Jose, California, c. 1952–53]; left margin with perforated holes, minor creasing and soiling. Matted, glazed and framed; not examined out of frame.

Neal and Carolyn Cassady and family

Carolyn Cassady, Heartbeat: My Life with Jack and Neal (1976), reproduced on p. 69; Cassady, Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg (1990), reproduced following p. 278

Condition as described in catalogue entry.
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"Doctor Sax and the Sea Shroud," a comic strip in five panels done for the three young children of Neal and Carolyn Cassady.

Jack Kerouac completed Dr. Sax, his great novel of childhood, in Mexico City in 1952. In 1952–53, he crossed the continent several times, often ending up at the Cassadys' small house in San Jose, California. Carolyn Cassady reproduces the drawing in two versions of her memoirs, captioning it in 1976, "Comic strip drawn by Jack Kerouac at the kitchen table for Cassady children, 1952 or '53." In 1990, she captions it, "A cartoon drawn by Jack to amuse the children in about 1953."

This comic book-style drawing, of course, relates to the Dr. Sax fantasies which derived from The Shadow Magazine and other comic book sources. In these panels, a shrouded figure rises out of a sunken tugboat near the Brooklyn waterfront, climbs a telephone pole and surveys the city. The next day, the creature appears at Borough Hall at noon, disguised in a business suit, carrying a briefcase.

The image of the shrouded figure appears several times in Kerouac's work, most notably in On the Road, where the creature is called the Ghost of the Susquehanna and is described as "a shriveled little old man with a paper satchel." In the late 1940s, Kerouac related to Allen Ginsburg a recurring nightmare in which a "Hooded Wayfarer without a Name" pursued him.

Here Kerouac takes one of the most haunting visions of his childhood and early adult years and transforms it into a humorous series of proto-Pop Art images for a very young audience. An amazing artifact of the Beat Generation, linking Kerouac, Neal and Carolyn Cassady and their family, On the Road, and Dr. Sax.