GRAVES, Robert.

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Good-Bye to All That. First edition, first state, of one of the best-known First World War memoirs.Published over a decade after the end of the conflict, when he was still suffering from the trauma of fighting in the trenches, the work was written in less than four months and under the influence of the young American poet Laura Riding, his lover and muse. "She also acted as intellectual and spiritual midwife both to a kind of personal rebirth, and to Graves's writing Good-Bye to All That (1929), the war-period autobiography which made him famous. In its original form, this is a searing work of genius in which Graves offers up a heavily rewritten version of his past life upon the altar of his present love" (ODNB).The first state of the book prints a poem by Siegfried Sassoon on pages 341-3. The poem was originally sent to Graves by letter, and upon finding it in print, Sassoon expressed his unhappiness, and demanded that the offending pages be cancelled. Higginson estimates that fewer than 100 copies of the first state exist.

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