 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."