Goodbye to All That Introduction by Miranda Seymour

On the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I: a hardcover edition of one of the best and most famous memoirs of the conflict.

Good-bye to All That was published a decade after the end of the first World War, as the poet and novelist Robert Graves was preparing to leave England for good. The memoir documents not only his own personal experience, as a patriotic young officer, of the horrors and disillusionment of battle, but also the wider loss of innocence the Great War brought about. By the time of his writing, a way of life had ended, and England and the modern world would never be the same. In Graves's portrayal of the dehumanizing misery of the trenches, his grief over lost friends, and the surreal absurdity of government bureaucracy, Graves uses broad comedy to make the most serious points about life and death.

Robert Graves (1895-1985) was a poet, novelist, translator, and author of more than 120 books of history, mythology, and fiction, including the historical novel I, Claudius and the mythological study The White Goddess. Born in England, he made his home in Majorca after 1929. He was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1961 and made an Honorary Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, in 1971. Good-bye to All That is his only autobiography.