The Enormous Room

by E. E. Cummings

Overview

In 1917 young Edward Estlin Cummings went to France as a volunteer with a Red Cross ambulance unit on the western front. But his free-spirited, insubordinate ways soon got him tagged as a possible enemy of La Patrie, and he was summarily tossed into a French concentration camp at La Ferte-Mace in Normandy. Under the vilest conditions, Cummings found fulfillment of his ever elusive quest for freedom. The Enormous Room, his account of his four-month confinement, reads like a latter-day Pilgrim's Progress, a journey into dispossession, to a place among the most debased and deprived of human creatures. Cummings's hopeful tone reflects the essential paradox of his existence: to lose everything is to become free, and so to be saved.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440621444
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/01/1999
Series:	Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	369 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, the son of a Unitarian minister. Educated at Harvard, in 1917 he moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and began to write poetry and paint. In June of that year he went to France as a Red Cross volunteer with the ambulance corps and was soon arrested and imprisoned, though not charged with a crime, in a French concentration camp. That experience inspired his autobiographical novel, The Enormous Room, which was published in 1922. The next year Tulips and Chimneys, the first of his many volumes of poetry, appeared. It is for his typographically creative poetry that he is best known, but Cummings also painted and wrote expressionist verse drama and prose. Until the 1930s, he preferred the lowercase e.e. cummings. He lived in Paris for a few years after World War I, then returned to New York. He died in 1962 in North Conway, New Hampshire.
Samuel Hynes is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of several major works of literary criticism, including The Auden Generation, Edwardian Occasions, and The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Hynes's wartime experiences as a Marine Corps pilot were the basis for his highly praised memoir, Flights of Passage. The Soldiers' Tale, his book about soldiers' narratives of the two world wars and Vietnam, won a Robert F. Kennedy Award. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Editorial Reviews

Cummings’s memoir-cum-novel is valuable for its outlook, as the author, who would publish his first poetry collection a year later, uses his wry voice to counteract the cruelties of war.”
—Benjamin Shull, Los Angeles Review of Books

“The canonical works of the First World War are most frequently concerned with the squandered lives of young men, yet Cummings’s report invaluably expands the reader’s grasp of the catastrophe. . . . The Enormous Room was originally published before Cummings’s debut collection of poems. . . and exhibits much of the fragmentary style and lively spirit for which his poetry would become known. Yet beneath these flourishes lies a sincere and biting critique of those responsible for the conflict, which rings as true now, in the book’s centenary year, as it did then.”
—Kathleen Rooney, The TLS

“The Enormous Room is a good book, an unusual book, an exciting book.”
—Robert Graves

“I went through The Enormous Room again . . . and from it knew, more keenly than from my own senses, the tang of herded men, and their smell. The reading is as sharp as being in prison, for all but that crazed drumming against the door which comes of solitary confinement.”
—T. E. Lawrence

“The Enormous Room lives on, because those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

From the Publisher