Synopsis
Goodbye to All That is Robert Graves’s searing farewell to innocence: an unflinching memoir of youth, war, and disillusionment. Written in the aftermath of World War I, this literary classic begins with Graves’s idyllic childhood in Victorian England and follows him through the brutal trenches of the Western Front, where he served as a young officer. With clarity and biting wit, Graves exposes the absurdities of military life, the horrors of modern warfare, and the cultural collapse that followed in its wake.
But this is more than a war memoir. It is a generational reckoning: a portrait of a world coming apart, and of a man walking away from it. With disarming honesty, Graves dissects his friendships, including his close association with fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, his shattered ideals, and his permanent break from the England he once called home. Goodbye to All That remains one of the most powerful, candid, and beautifully written accounts of the First World War and the end of an era.
About the Author
Robert Graves (1895–1985) was an English poet, novelist, classical scholar, critic, and memoirist whose long and varied career made him one of the most distinctive literary figures of the twentieth century. Born in London and educated at Charterhouse, Graves served as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers during the First World War, an experience that shaped much of his early poetry and gave rise to his celebrated memoir Goodbye to All That. His writing combined classical learning, emotional directness, scepticism toward official pieties, and a sharply independent literary intelligence.
Graves’s career ranged widely across poetry, historical fiction, translation, mythology, and literary criticism. He is especially remembered for I, Claudius, Claudius the God, The White Goddess, and his enduring body of lyric poetry. After the war he lived for many years in Majorca, where he continued to write with remarkable productivity. His work remains central to the literature of the First World War, modern British poetry, and twentieth-century historical fiction, and Goodbye to All That stands as one of the defining memoirs of wartime experience, lost youth, and postwar disillusionment.
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