Baron Corvo. 
 
New Directions: 1953. First edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Octavo. Chipping along the top, bottom, and folds of the jacket, which is intact but brittle. Leaves are a little sunned and there's slight fading on the text block. 299 pages. Jacket good, book very good. 
 
After writing some major pieces of acid-tongued fiction and then destroying most of his relationships, Baron Corvo moved to Venice, a city he was so in love with he refused to ever leave it. Penniless and patronless, he wrote this final autobiographical masterpiece about the refined man of letters Nicholas Crabbe, who is cared for and loved by the teenage boy-girl Zilda. The astonished introduction and foreword, by A.J.A. Symons and W.H. Auden, respectively, join the chorus of Corvo's admirers who see Crabbe's love as Corvo's paranoiac, homosexual passion.  
 
"'You can tell a story more fascinatingly than any man alive: so your part shall be to give my story historic verisimilitude and literary form. I know. And we'll go halves in the profits.'"