Park Barnitz (1878–1901)

David Park Barnitz (June 24, 1878 – October 10, 1901)[1] was an American poet, best known for his 1901 volume The Book of Jade, a classic of Decadent poetry. In 1901, San Francisco bookseller William Doxey, publisher of the popular humorist Gelett Burgess, as well as many obscure, macabre (and sometimes decadent) authors, came to New York City. Two years before, his publishing enterprise, called "At the Sign of the Lark", had gone bankrupt. By February 1901, Doxey's new venture was bankrupt once again, but not before he had published—at its author's insistence, anonymously—a little-known masterpiece of decadent and nihilistic verse entitled, simply, The Book of Jade. Later that autumn, mid-west newspapers were reporting the sudden death of a 23-year-old Harvard graduate and Orientalist scholar, David Park Barnitz (1878–1901), who was, the obituaries said, the anonymous author of "a volume of poems...which was spoken of as of unusual merit." That book was The Book of Jade—one of the poems from The Book of Jade having been published in the Overland Monthly in March, 1901, under a new title, but under Park Barnitz's own name. And while the newspapers were saying that Barnitz had died accidentally, of an "enlarged heart", it was soon clear that Barnitz had committed suicide at the age of 23.