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	<author id="3012988">
  <name><![CDATA[Robert Graves]]></name>
  <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3012988.Robert_Graves]]></link>
  <fans-count type="integer">13</fans-count>
  <followers-count type="integer">0</followers-count>
  <image_url>http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1251049332p5/3012988.jpg</image_url>
  <about><![CDATA[Robert Ranke Graves, born in Wimbledon, received his early education at King's College School &amp; Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon &amp; Charterhouse School &amp; won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. While at Charterhouse in 1912, he fell in love with G. H.Johnstone, a boy of fourteen (&quot;Dick&quot; in Goodbye to All That) When challenged by the headmaster he defended himself by citing Plato, Greek poets, Michelangelo &amp; Shakespeare, &quot;who had felt as I did.&quot;
 At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his 1st volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet &amp; was one of the 1st to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously 'part of the war poetry boom'. At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment thru the lung that he was expected to die, &amp; indeed was officially reported as died of wounds. He gradually recovered. Apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the rest of the war in England.
 One of Graves's closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities &amp; persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, &amp; to treat him accordingly. As a result Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart, the military hospital near Edinburgh, where he was treated by Dr W.H.R. Rivers &amp; met fellow patient Wilfred Owen. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, altho he was never hospitalised for it.
Biographers document the story well. It is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies &amp; Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Sassoon himself remarked upon a &quot;heavy sexual element&quot; within it, an observation supported by the sentimental nature of much of their surviving correspondence. Thru Sassoon, he also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, &quot;a set of 12 Apostle spoons&quot;.
 Following his marriage &amp; the end of the war, Graves belatedly took up his place at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children &amp; the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split up with his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded &amp; edited the literary journal Epilogue, &amp; wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) &amp; A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928). Both had great influence on modern literary criticism, particularly new criticism.
 In 1927, he also published Lawrence &amp; the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T.E. Lawrence. Good-bye to All That (1929, revised &amp; republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complexly compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.
 Graves &amp; Riding left Majorca in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, they moved to th]]></about>    <gender>male</gender>  <hometown>Wimbledon</hometown>  <born_at>07/24/1895</born_at>  <died_at>12/07/1985</died_at>  
  
  
  <books>
        <book id="18765">
  <title><![CDATA[I, Claudius]]></title>
  <authors>
    <author>
      <name><![CDATA[Robert Graves]]></name>
      <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3012988.Robert_Graves]]></link>
    </author>
      </authors>
  <average_rating>4.31</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>2820</ratings_count>
  <published>1934</published>  
  
</book>
        <book id="52251">
  <title><![CDATA[Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina]]></title>
  <authors>
    <author>
      <name><![CDATA[Robert Graves]]></name>
      <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3012988.Robert_Graves]]></link>
    </author>
      </authors>
  <average_rating>4.11</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>918</ratings_count>
  <published>1935</published>  
  
</book>
        <book id="55428">
  <title><![CDATA[Goodbye to All That]]></title>
  <authors>
    <author>
      <name><![CDATA[Robert Graves]]></name>
      <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3012988.Robert_Graves]]></link>
    </author>
      </authors>
  <average_rating>4.02</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>447</ratings_count>
  <published>1929</published>  
  
</book>
        <book id="820461">
  <title><![CDATA[The Greek Myths]]></title>
  <authors>
    <author>
      <name><![CDATA[Robert Graves]]></name>
      <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3012988.Robert_Graves]]></link>
    </author>
      </authors>
  <average_rating>4.22</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>367</ratings_count>
  <published>1955</published>  
  
</book>
        <book id="820465">
  <title><![CDATA[The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth]]></title>
  <authors>
    <author>
      <name><![CDATA[Robert Graves]]></name>
      <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3012988.Robert_Graves]]></link>
    </author>
      </authors>
  <average_rating>3.92</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>281</ratings_count>
  <published>1920</published>  
  
</book>
        <book id="18769">
  <title><![CDATA[I, Claudius and Claudius the God]]></title>
  <authors>
    <author>
      <name><![CDATA[Robert Graves]]></name>
      <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3012988.Robert_Graves]]></link>
    </author>
      </authors>
  <average_rating>4.37</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>235</ratings_count>
  <published>1988</published>  
  
</book>
        <book id="456386">
  <title><![CDATA[King Jesus: A Novel]]></title>
  <authors>
    <author>
      <name><![CDATA[Robert Graves]]></name>
      <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3012988.Robert_Graves]]></link>
    </author>
      </authors>
  <average_rating>3.91</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>109</ratings_count>
  <published>1946</published>  
  
</book>
        <book id="324312">
  <title><![CDATA[Count Belisarius]]></title>
  <authors>
    <author>
      <name><![CDATA[Robert Graves]]></name>
      <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3012988.Robert_Graves]]></link>
    </author>
      </authors>
  <average_rating>4.04</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>70</ratings_count>
  <published>1938</published>  
  
</book>
        <book id="324325">
  <title><![CDATA[Greek Gods and Heroes]]></title>
  <authors>
    <author>
      <name><![CDATA[Robert Graves]]></name>
      <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3012988.Robert_Graves]]></link>
    </author>
      </authors>
  <average_rating>3.61</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>72</ratings_count>
  <published>1960</published>  
  
</book>
        <book id="23751">
  <title><![CDATA[Homer's Daughter]]></title>
  <authors>
    <author>
      <name><![CDATA[Robert Graves]]></name>
      <link><![CDATA[http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3012988.Robert_Graves]]></link>
    </author>
      </authors>
  <average_rating>3.76</average_rating>
  <ratings_count>51</ratings_count>
  <published>1955</published>  
  
</book>
      </books>
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