The Enormous Room

Cummings, E. E.

£12.99

Drawing on E.E. Cumming’s experiences in France as an ambulance driver, ‘The Enormous Room’ was one of the greatest American literary works to emerge out of the First World War. This edition offers a multifaceted lens onto the inner life of the poet.

Out of stock

Publish Date: 26/07/2022
ISBN: 9781681376196 Category: Tag:

Description

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.

Additional information

Weight 283 g
Dimensions 202 × 126 × 15 mm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

xix, 265

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

813.52 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K