In Great War-era France, E. E. Cummings is lifted, along with his friend B., from his job as an ambulance driver with the Red Cross, and deposited in a jail in La Ferte Mace as a suspected spy. There his life consists of strolls in the cour, la soupe, and his mattress in The Enormous Room, the male prisoners' communal cell. It's these prisoners whom Cummings describes in lurid detail.
The Enormous Room is far from a straightforward autobiographical diary. Cummings' descriptions, peppered liberally with colloquial French, avoid time and, for the most part, place, and instead focus on the personal aspects of his internment, especially in the almost metaphysical description of the most otherworldly of his compatriots: The Delectable Mountains.
During his imprisonment, Cummings' father petitioned the U.S. and French authorities for his liberty. This, and his eventual return home, are described in the book's introduction.
Perfect for readers who appreciate experimental literature and unflinching wartime narratives, this modernist masterpiece offers Cummings' signature poetic style applied to a harrowing yet darkly humorous prison experience. A essential read for fans of literary war memoirs and anyone interested in how great poets transform personal trauma into enduring art.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)
