The novel was written quickly in the improvisatory style Kerouac called “spontaneous prose.” In a letter to Allen Ginsberg dated May 18, 1952, Kerouac wrote, “I’ll simply blow like a jazz musician on the vision of the Shadow in my 13th and 14th years on Sarah Ave. Lowell, culminated by the myth itself as I dreamt it in Fall 1948 . . . angles of my hoop-rolling boyhood as seen from the shroud.” In a letter to Ginsberg dated November 8 of the same year, Kerouac admits “"Doctor Sax" was written high on tea without pausing to think, sometimes Bill [Burroughs would come in the room and so the chapter ended there, . . .” (ibid, p. 185).