Goodbye to All That: an Autobiography (Warbler Classics Annotated Edition) - Paperback

by Robert Graves (Author)

First published in 1929, Goodbye to All That is Robert Graves's indelible reckoning with the First World War and its ruinous effects on a generation of young men. Written with stark candor and disquieting irony, this modern memoir captures the disillusionment of a soldier-poet who entered the trenches of the Western Front as an idealist and emerged scarred in both body and spirit. Graves records with unsparing detail the obscene conditions of trench life with its mud, rot, and relentless shellfire, and the moral fracture that made postwar England feel unrecognizable to those who survived.

At once a personal confession and a cultural farewell, Goodbye to All That charts the unmaking of old loyalties of class, patriotism, religion and the birth of the literary modernism that would define the century. Graves's prose moves between brutality and wit, intimacy and detachment, giving voice to the psychological shock that haunted a generation and reshaped the moral landscape of the modern world.

This Warbler Classics edition reproduces the original 1929 text and includes an extensive biographical timeline.