The Enormous Room

A centenary edition of E. E. Cummings's antic autobiographical novel about his imprisonment in a French military detention camp during World War I.

In 1917, after the entry of America into World War I, E. E. Cummings, a recent graduate of Harvard College, volunteered to serve on an ambulance corps in France. He arrived in Paris with a new friend, William Slater Brown, and they set about living it up in the big city before heading off to their assignment. Once in the field, they wrote irreverent letters about their experiences, which attracted the attention of the censors and ultimately led to their arrest. They were held for months in a military detention camp, sharing a single large room with a host of fellow detainees. It is this experience that Cummings relates in lightly fictionalized form in The Enormous Room, a book in which a tale of woe becomes an occasion of exuberant mischief. A free-spirited novel that displays the same formal swagger as his poems, a stinging denunciation of the stupidity of military authority, and a precursor to later books like Catch-22 and MASH, Cummings’s novel is an audacious, uninhibited, lyrical, and lasting contribution to American literature.

E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) was a renowned poet, novelist, playwright, and painter best known for the unique syntax and orthography that he employed in his written work. During World War I, while serving in the ambulance corps in France, he was arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage due to perceived anti-war sentiments in his letters home. He was freed after several months and soon returned to the United States, where he was drafted into the army and served on a base in Massachusetts until the end of the war. The Enormous Room was published four years later.
 
Nicholas Delbanco is the author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, the memoir Why Writing Matters, the essay collection Curiouser and Curiouser, and the novel The Years. He is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. He lives in Cape Cod and New York City.