I, Claudius was the most widely read and commercially successful book Robert Graves had written to that point. Although his autobiography Good-Bye to All That and his growing reputation as a war poet had placed him on the literary map, it was not until I, Claudius that he was able to make a reasonable living from his writing.

Within a few months of its publication, the book had been reprinted four times in Great Britain and the United States. Although Graves considered the book to be a potboiler that he wrote only for the money, it went on to win the James Tait Black and Hawthornden Prizes of 1935. Writing in The Nation & Atheneum, the novelist Mary McCarthy wrote that the book was "amazingly full of color and imagination." In 1935, Alexander Korda purchased the film rights to I, Claudius with the intention of making a movie starting...