Good-bye To All That is one of the finest records of trench warfare of the 1914-1918 war. Written at white-heat from May to when it was first published on 18 November 1929, this anti-war autobiography also stands as Graves’s wave goodbye to the people and places he knew in England. In Deyá, and influenced by Laura Riding, his new Muse, he used it as ‘an opportunity for a formal good-bye to you and to you and to you and to me and to all that; forgetfulness, because once all this has been settled in my mind and written down it need never be thought about again; money.’
In 1957, Graves re-visited the work, deleting and adding sections to it. The fact that it is continually reprinted attests to its classic status.
Robert Graves, Good-bye To All That. 4th English ed. (revised). London: The Folio Society, 1981.
Robert Graves, Good-bye To All That. Penguin Modern Classics reprint edition. London: Penguin Books, 1975.