The Butterfly

Fiction. THE BUTTERFLY first appeared in 1962 and drew on Rumaker's experiences as a patient in Rockland State Hospital and love affairs with Yoko Ono and Joyce Johnson. As Rumaker's protagonist puts it, "The real cure lay within himself, that the regenerative and restorative powers were within him the child of him which was yet to come into being " Jim's journey to sanity is still powerful and vivid today more than fifty years after it was originally published.