Good-bye to all that

First published in 1929, Robert Graves's Good-bye to All That is a bracingly unsentimental autobiography that recounts his childhood, schooling, military service in the First World War, and disillusioned return to postwar England. Written in a spare, ironic, and often mordantly witty prose, the book stands as one of the defining memoirs of the war generation. Its candor about trench warfare, class conventions, and literary society places it within the great interwar literature of disenchantment, alongside other testimonies of a civilization morally exhausted by conflict. Graves, poet, classicist, and novelist, drew on unusually intimate experience in composing this work. Educated at Charterhouse and commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers, he survived the Somme and suffered both physical and psychological trauma. His friendships with figures such as Siegfried Sassoon and his later estrangement from English social and cultural orthodoxies sharpened the book's critical edge. The autobiography registers not only private memory but a decisive renunciation of a world Graves believed had betrayed its young. This is an essential book for readers of war literature, modern autobiography, and British cultural history. Good-bye to All That rewards attention for its historical precision, emotional restraint, and enduring intelligence, offering a singular portrait of a man—and a generation—severing itself from the old order.