The English poet Robert Graves (1895-1985) was also a very productive novelist, mythographer, critic and historian, with over 130 books to his credit. He was once nominated for the Nobel Prize.

Robert Ranke Graves was the son of a minor poet and celebrated Irish balladeer. His stepmother, a grandniece of German historian Leopold von Ranke, imposed a rigid morality on her husband and children which made young Robert poorly prepared for the rigor of English public school. He left school at the onset of the First World War, and enlisted promptly. He was wounded by shrapnel, not yet 21, and went home shell-shocked and suffering from severe neurosis because of the daily horrors of his year in France. Graves was treated by Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, an anthropologist turned neurologist, and it was Rivers who convinced Graves that his cure lay in writing. Rivers also was responsible for Graves's...