First edition in English, US issue, first printing, presentation copy from the translator Ruth Draper, inscribed on the front free endpaper "To Walter Oakley, with the regards of Ruth Draper. October 1931." Oakley was the US-based sales manager of the Oxford University Press. A lovely copy in the very scarce jacket of the 1928 Olympic Prizewinning verse-play (first printed in Italian, Milan 1930, here printed for the first time with facing Italian-English translation) by the extraordinary Italian poet Lauro de Bosis (1901-31). In 1928, Lauro de Bosis, the son of poet and translator Adolpho de Bosis, had entered the literary competition of the Olympic Games with this classical drama entitled "Icaro", for which he won the silver medal - 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. Then, on 3 October 1931, after enduring a period of political exile for his support of Victor Emmanuel III (De Bosis was posing as a concierge in a Rome hotel named after the king), Lauro de Bosis, not a trained flyer, took to the skies over Rome in a plane that he had bought for the purpose (christened "Pegasus"), and hurled thousands of antifascist leaflets down upon the city. Through the agency of Mussolini's air force, de Bosis completed his first and final flight in true Icarian style, plunging in flames into the Tyrrhenian sea. On the night before this fatal flight, however, de Bosis had written a letter, a politically and poetically defiant suicide note, addressing himself simultaneously to his family, to the king, to Mussolini, to people of Rome, and to posterity, entitled "L'Histoire de ma Mort". On the way to the aviation field in the morning, he had 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, which (as well as in the New York Times) it was, bringing to the name of Lauro de Bosis a brief flare of world-wide fame for his daring act. The translator of this work was the magnetic American actress Ruth Draper (1884-1956), who had been De Bosis's lover. This copy contains a laudatory contemporary review clipping, praising de Bosis's "tragedy of Icarus, who gave his life that man should win the kingdom of the air, as the poet himself was to give his life for the freedom of thought and of the press." Very scarce thus, with the jacket, in such good condition, and inscribed.
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