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Seven Stories Press

Works of Radical Imagination

Proceed, Sergeant Lamb

The Continuing Saga of Sergeant Lamb During the American War of Independence

by Robert Graves

Book cover for Proceed, Sergeant Lamb
Book cover for Proceed, Sergeant Lamb

Robert Graves continues the fictionalized account of the adventures of Sergeant Robert Lamb, an Irish soldier who fought for the British during the American Revolutionary War.

Featuring a new introduction by Madison Smartt Bell.


Sergeant Roger Lamb is in a prison camp near Boston with 3,000 other soldiers in General Johnny Burgoyne's army who surrendered at the Battle of Saratoga. Lamb is a non-commissioned officer in the British Army who served in America during the American War of Independence. But the American Congress refuses to ratify a repatriation agreement and Lamb plans an escape. He manages to make his way through General Washington's lines and rejoins Cornwallis in the Carolinas, fighting with him until Yorktown. Then he makes another remarkable escape to rejoin the British in New York.

The second in a two-book series, this account is inspired by the real-life Sergeant Lamb’s personal memoirs. Renowned poet, classicist, and novelist Robert Graves traces the sergeant’s harrowing time in military service, providing a compelling, only barely fictionalized eyewitness account of a crucial point in American history.

Book cover for Proceed, Sergeant Lamb
Book cover for Proceed, Sergeant Lamb

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Robert Graves

Robert Graves (1895–1985) was a preeminent English poet, novelist, critic, translator, and scholar of classical mythology. He served in World War I—an experience recounted in his 1929 autobiography, Good-Bye to All That—and later became the first professor of English literature at the University of Cairo. Best remembered today for his acclaimed historical novels about the Roman emperor Claudius, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, his other books include Count Belisarius, Lawrence and the Arabs, They Hanged My Saintly Billy, Homer's Daughter, The Golden Fleece, The Siege and Fall of Troy, Ann at Highwood Hall, The White GoddessThe Hebrew Myths, and Collected Poems. He is also the co-author of The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose. 

Other books by Robert Graves