The Enormous Room - Softcover

Cummings, E. E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1420942743 ISBN 13: 9781420942743

Publisher: Digireads.Com, 2011

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Digireads.Com
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1420942743
• ISBN 13: 9781420942743
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 157