First published in 2003. GABRIELE D''ANNUNZIO was born in 1863 in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, the son of a wealthy landowner. His first volume of poetry was published in 1879, when he was sixteen. After graduating from the University of Rome, d''Annunzio married and began to write short stories to support his wife and family. In 1919 d''Annunzio led a small force to seize the town of Fiume, ruling it as a dictator until 1921. D''Annunzio spent the later part of his life at his home on Lake Garda. In 1937 he was made President of the Italian Royal Academy. He died in 1938 and was given a state funeral by Mussolini. When Halcyon was first published, at the end of 1903, its author was already forty and famous: J/ placere, which ranks with A rebours and The Picture of Dorian Gray as a novel of the Decadence, had appeared in 1889, and d''Annunzio had published other novels, short stories, plays, and many volumes of poetry since his first great success at the age of sixteen.