Offhand I can think of three (auto)biographical works (in some cases partly fictionalized) whose title follows this pattern:
Was Graves’s book the first to use this title template? Or are there earlier examples?
Discussed briefly on Stack Exchange:
No clear conclusion. A wiki cite supports the idea that Graves started the trend in 1934, but it’s unknown whether this is his own coining or if it’s supposed to be a classical-lit reference to something.
Oh, and I’d add “I, Robot” and “I, the Jury” as titles that follow the syntax. Not biographical but clearly inspired.
Graves’s title sounds like it might plausibly be the incipit of a classical autobiography. (An incipit is the first few words of a text. Since many ancient and medieval works didn’t have titles, their incipits were often used to refer to them in the same way as a title.) I wonder if there is any memoir from Ancient Rome that actually begins this way.
Worth mentioning: Isaac Asimov later published a memoir titled I. Asimov with a period rather than a comma (though some listings on Amazon give the title as I, Asimov). I’m sure it’s a nod to this syntax as used in I, Robot as well as his first initial.
Wow. I’ve used the book as research a hundred times and never noticed that. Great catch.
“I, Robot” doesn’t originate with Asimov, BTW, but with a 1939 story by Eando Binder. The use on Asimov’s robot stories was a blatant steal, which Asimov disliked.
IIRC, Asimov wanted to call the compilation “Mind and Iron”, which IMO is a better match for the themes of the stories therein.
And he acknowledged that the title wasn’t his, originally:
[“I, Robot”] certainly caught my attention. Two months after I read it, I began ‘Robbie’, about a sympathetic robot, and that was the start of my positronic robot series. Eleven years later, when nine of my robot stories were collected into a book, the publisher named the collection I, Robot over my objections. My book is now the more famous, but Otto’s story was there first.[1]