The Enormous Room

Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962), famously known as E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, essayist, painter, author, and playwright. His body of work encompasses 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous paintings and drawings. He is remembered as an unsurpassed voice of 20th century poetry, as well as one of the most popular, even today. Cummings attended Harvard, receiving both his bachelor's and master's by 1916. A year later, he enlisted in the ambulance service as a driver with a friend for six months in France. Because of an error of the military censor, Cummings spent three months in a French prison. From this experience came "The Enormous Room", a prose account of life in a military prison that contains no traces of bitterness or self-pity commonly found in such works. Instead, Cummings looked at the daily life and the strange characters in the enormous room with the playful eye and original wit so apparent in his poems.