Icaro.: Preface by Gilbert Murray.

New York: Oxford University Press,, 1933. Inscribed and translated by his muse First edition in English, first printing, US issue, inscribed by Ruth Draper, the translator and lover of De Bosis, to the volume's publisher, "To G. F. J. Cumberlege with the grateful regards of Ruth Draper, Nov. 1933". Cumberlege, vice president at Oxford University Press New York from 1928 to 1934, was also a decorated soldier who, like De Bosis, received great praise for his valiant actions in Italy. Geoffrey Fenwick Jocelyn Cumberlege (1891-1979) "had been a distinguished soldier, and to all the critical problems of his publishing career he brought the military virtues of leadership, quick decision, and positive action" (ODNB). He was thrice mentioned in despatches during the First World War and received the Military Cross, the Italian Croce de Guerra, and numerous other honours. He joined Oxford University Press after his demobilization and was later appointed as vice president of the press's failing branch in New York. Cumberlege revitalized the business to great success; among his publications were distinguished American children's books and T. E. Lawrence's translation of The Odyssey, published the year before this translation of De Bosis. Ruth Draper (1884-1956) was an American actress whose passionate love affair with De Bosis was cut short after the writer, in true Icarus style, was shot down by Mussolini's forces while flying above Rome and hurling thousands of antifascist leaflets down upon the city. Draper never fully recovered from her loss and honoured De Bosis's memory by making this translation. She also had the work translated into French, convinced Cumberlege to publish a collection De Bosis had edited, The Golden Book of Italian Poetry (1932), and set up the Lauro De Bosis Lectureship in the History of Italian Civilization, which continued to fund postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard as recently as 2020. Lauro De Bosis (1901-1931) entered Icaro into a drama competition held at the 1928 Olympic Games, where it won a silver medal. Published in 1930, it was a work of Romantic mytho-politics in which the tyrant Minos bore obvious parallels to Mussolini, and the hero Icarus to De Bosis himself. On the night before his fatal flight, De Bosis wrote a letter, a defiant suicide note, addressing himself simultaneously to his family, to the king, to Mussolini, to the people of Rome, and to posterity, entitled "L'Histoire de ma Mort". On the way to the aviation field in the morning, he posted this letter to a journalist friend in Belgium with the instruction that it be published in all the newspapers of Europe still free from fascist censorship, bringing to the name of Lauro De Bosis a brief flare of world-wide fame for his daring act. Octavo. Original blue buckram, gilt title on spine and front cover, top edge gilt, other edges untrimmed. With dust jacket. Pencil ownership inscription on front free endpaper, "Richard Tolson, Oxford, 2002". Binding lightly mottled, foxing to edges and endpapers, contents clean; jacket foxed, less visibly so on bright blue panels, slightly rubbed with a couple of small chips and closed tears, toned spine with long closed tear at foot, issued without printed price: a very good copy in the attractively designed jacket.