John Rigney, Jr

John “Butch” Rigney, Jr. ( 1937–1967) wanted to be a writer. As a youth, Butch went in and out of a series of reform schools for stealing, and even jumping from a bridge in the Bronx into the Hudson River. He and his brother and sister enduring abusive parents before each leaving as teenagers.

The early writings of Rigney are dated 1963, when he served in the Air Force while stationed in Alaska. In New York, he continued writing what became a novel and several related short stories. Some of the chapters are dated 1966, so it can be assumed that this work was his final.

His social interactions with fellow parolees, and the desperate romances of the women in his life, are captured in a blunt yet poetic style.

The entire box of original pages was allegedly with Butch at his Bailey Place home when he died, of an overdose, with two women at his bedside, on December 6, 1967.

After being stored in his sister’s Ohio home for decades, her son, writer Jim Provenzano, shipped them to his own home in San Francisco. The manuscript pages were sorted, scanned, converted to text and edited, mostly for punctuation and grammar while retaining Rigney’s self-taught writing style. A sad tone of desperation pervades the characters of his stories, each intertwined with a tone of sorrow of a lost era.