The literature contains reports that peracid oxidation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons leads to formation of K-region arene oxides including those of pyrene and dibenzo[a,h]anthracene.ls2 It has been stated, however, that the products isolated were of questionable purity and remained to be characterized definitively.3 On the other hand, a number of procedures have geen devised recently for the synthesis of such biographically significant arene oxides from the parent polynuclear hydrocarbons4, but all suffer from the disadvantage that they are multistep in character and in our experience, the itmnediate precursors may be difficultly accessible, and undesirable complications may interfere. For these reasons we have reinvestigated the possible synthetic utility of direct arene oxidation using m-chloroperbenzoic acid as the oxidant.5 Previous experience has shown that acenaphthylene may be oxidized to the corresponding oxide under carefully controlled conditions6 which suggested that this method could conceivably be extended to less reactive systems. The previous difficulties encountered in isolating the oxide may be attributed primarily to the tendency of the rather acidic by-product, mchlorobenzoic acid, to induce acid catalyzed rearrangement(s) to phenols (or ketones) and/or