Sergeant Lamb Novels

Graves Robert

The life of Sergeant Roger Lamb, a young Dubliner who served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during the American War of Independence, was the subject of a novelistic enterprise originally published in two parts because of war time paper shortages. The final result is a pair of picaresque novels concerned with the passions and frustrations of a distant war which mirrored many of Graves' own feelings for the Second World War which was happening around him. As an account of the struggle for independence, the horrors and excitements of war, the two novels were well reviewed and popular when published in the early Forties. This chance to have both parts of what Graves considered to be a single project in one volume offers the unique opportunity of access to a literary and historical gem which both opens up the world of the American War of Independence, and the creative life and mind of a great writer of our age

Carcanet's Robert Graves Programme brings into print, over the next decade, the bulk of Graves' writings in verse and prose in new editions with introductions by poets, scholars and other authorities.

About the Author

Robert Graves (1895-1985), poet, classical scholar, novelist, and critic, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. Athough he produced over 100 books he is perhaps best known for the novel "I, Claudius" (1934), "The White Goddess" (1948) and "Greek Myths" (1955).

Robert Graves was born in Wimbledon, South London. His father, Alfred Percival Graves, was a school inspector, and his mother, Amalie von Ranke Graves, was a great-niece of the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1866). He was educated at Charterhouse, and awarded a B. Litt by St. John's College, Oxford after his return from World war I, where he served alsongside Siegfried Sassoon.

Robert Graves died in 1985 in Deja, the Majorcan village he had made his home (with the exception of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War) since 1929.

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