The Golden Round

New York/London: The Century Co.. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. 1928. First Edition. Hardcover. NOISBN . [moderate wear and bumping at spine ends, small scrape/gouge (shallow) at bottom of text block; jacket shows some wear along top and bottom edges, a little paper loss at both ends of spine, browning to spine, tiny chip at top of rear panel]. Historical novel of passionate romance and court intrigue, set in 13th-century Italy, in which a cobbler's son, Pier, rises to be a trusted advisor to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (called "Frideric" in the book), but has the bad fortune to be married "to one of those beautiful women to whom success is but the fuel to higher ambition" (you know the type, I'm sure). Urged to be disloyal to the Emperor by both his missus and the Pope (the Pope, for God's sake!), poor Pier is eventually accused of "the vilest treason" (even though he's innocent) and kills himself (although the book is a little fudgy on this point) while still under that cloud. Pier (full name Pier della Vigne) pops up, so to speak, as a tree in the "Wood of Suicides," in the second level of the Seventh Circle of Hell in Dante's "Inferno." The author was an Italian-American writer and translator who emigrated to the U.S. from Sicily in 1907; the first of her four husbands was V.J. Jerome, later to become a prominent American Communist writer and propagandist. .