The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea

A childhood in the 1950s and ‘60s among grifters, show girls, and mob enforcers who embraced the boy and made him who he is.

“These stories make for one of the most important and moving American bildungsromans of all time.” —William Boyle, The Southwest Review

Roy tells it the way he sees it, shuttled between Chicago to Key West and Tampa, Havana and Jackson MS, usually with his mother Kitty, often in the company of lip-sticked women and fast men. Roy is the muse of Gifford’s hardboiled styl...