The Enormous Room

by E. E. Cummings

Overview

An autobiographical novel of captivity in World War I France from a prize-winning literary icon.

Working as an ambulance driver in the First World War, a young man is suddenly taken in by the authorities, along with his friend who has been targeted for his antiwar sentiments. This novel recounts E. E. Cummings’s experience spending four months in an “enormous room” with other prisoners, enlivened by the people he meets and the events he witnesses in the midst of his bizarre situation.

Cummings, recipient of a Bollingen Prize, a National Book Award citation, and many other literary honors, draws on his own life for this outstanding novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504063777
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	06/30/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

E. E. Cummings was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays.

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