The final poet that Ella Sterling Cummins profiles in her curious but informative 1893 review of Californian writers, The Story of the Files, is a young Italian immigrant:
Among the volumes of verse published in California none have so pathetic [i.e. emotional] a history as those written by Lorenzo Sosso. Born in Italy, young Sosso came when but a child with his parents to California, and soon forgot his native language. But the spirit of genius burned on through years of poverty and menial labor. In intervals of work poems came crowding into his brain, almost faster than he could write them. Night study brought familiarity with classic myths and the meters of the poets. His savings of years published a volume before he was twenty years of age. It contained many ideas and graceful lines, but of this edition he did not sell a copy.
Cummins goes on to describe several more of Sosso’s failed publications, and then, worst of all, his employment at the Post Office: “here he became part of the machine, and has been so busily employed that in the time that has since elapsed he has written not one word. But he has evidently been thinking, and, when a few more years have passed over his head, may speak again.”
That same year, Lorenzo Sosso married Emma Henley, and by 1895 they two children, so it is perhaps unsurprising that he took a job in “the machine” to support his family. As Cummins surmised, Sosso had indeed been thinking, though it took a decade to achieve results. in 1902 Elder & Shepard published Sosso’s In the Realms of Gold, a 171-page volume containing 114 poems written between 1891 and 1901. The dedication, to his wife Emma, would touch the heart of any romantic:
To her whose faith is still secure
Through all incertitudes of life,
The many days of joy, the few
Joyless, since she is joy thereof;
To her, the purest of the pure,
To her, the truest of the true,
The mother wedded in the wife,
I dedicate this book with love.
Paul Elder published a fair amount of original literature and poetry, but almost all of it was of poor quality, and Sosso is no exception: his verses are not memorable. There are some sparks that exhort the reader to a greater good, such as in his poem “The Socialist”:
While I hear the wailing
Of the wronged and weak
Sadly unavailing
Are the words you speak:
Where there is oppression
Manhood must resist;
Therefore this confession—
I’m a Socialist!…
Every back we lighten
Of its burdens sore,
Every home we brighten
Helps us more and more:
O the millions living
Toiling in the night!
O the task of giving
To such millions light!
Sadly, Sosso’s wife Emma died in 1914, at the age of 53. Sosso never remarried, and died in Marin County on 2 November 1967 at the age of 98.
In the Realms of Gold was issued in a limited edition of 500 copies, printed on non-watermarked laid paper by the Murdock Press. The cover artwork is not signed but is undoubtedly by Morgan Shepard, who probably also designed the tomoye on the title page. The frontispiece, a single leaf on coated stock, is a signed portrait of Sosso. On the title page, Elder is still calling himself “D. P. Elder.” There is no colophon.