Robert von Ranke Graves was born in Wimbledon on July 24th, 1895: (von Ranke was his middle name). The son of an Inspector of Schools and a German mother, he was the third youngest of ten siblings. After secondary schooling at Charterhouse, where he earned an exhibition for Oxford, he received a commission with the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1914 at the beginning of First World War. In 1916, already a captain, he was badly wounded at the battle of the Somme. In 1918 he married Nancy Nicholson and together they had four children. In 1919 he resigned his commission, and he took his place at Oxford University. By 1926, with 20 books published, he began a literary and sentimental partnership with American writer Laura Riding which led to the breakup of his marriage with Nancy.
In 1929, Laura attempted suicide and, while she was in hospital, Robert wrote Goodbye to All That. When Laura recovered, they left England together and settled in Deià, Mallorca. There, in 1931, they built Ca n'Alluny; Robert wrote I,Claudius to pay off the mortgage. In 1936, at the outbreak of the Civil War, the couple were forced to leave Spain. They returned to England and from there went to Switzerland, to France and finally to America where, in 1939, the Graves-Riding partnership ended when Laura went off with their host Schuyler Jackson, and whom she then married.
Back in England, shortly before the beginning of Second World War, Robert began a relationship with Beryl Hodge. They settled in Galmpton, South Devon, and had three children. This was a highly productive period of writing which culminated with The White Goddess. In May 1946, anxious to get back to Spain at the end of the war, he returned with his new family (by air-taxi) to Deià. He found Ca n’Alluny, which had been looked after by his village friends for ten years, just as he had left it.
In Mallorca Robert continued his heavy writing schedule and travelled back to England for a couple weeks each year to see publishers, family and friends. After obtaining his divorce from Nancy, Robert married Beryl in 1950, and had their fourth child in 1953. In 1954 he was invited to give the Clark Lectures at Cambridge and, beginning in 1957, he began short but lucrative annual lecture and poetry reading tours to the United States and Great Britain. In 1961 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. Among his many literary awards was the 1968 Queen’s Medal for Poetry from H.M. Elizabeth II. He was also made an Adoptive Son of Deià in 1968
Robert began suffering loss of memory towards the mid 1960s, which gradually slowed down his literary output, and by 1974 he had stopped writing altogether: his last trip to England was in 1976. Robert spent the remainder of his life secluded in Ca n’Alluny with his family and visited by friends and relatives. The 1976 BBC production of I, Claudius paid for his care. He died on December 7th, 1985 and is buried in the lovely Deià cemetery under a large cypress tree.