The Enormous Room

by E. E. Cummings, George James Firmage (Editor)

Overview

"A prose work of literary art. There had never been anything quite like it before and there has never been anything like it since." —Richard S. Kennedy

In print continuously since 1922, The Enormous Room is one of the classic American literary works to emerge from World War I, in a grouping that includes John Dos Passo's Three Soldiers and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Drawing on his experiences in France as a volunteer ambulance driver, Cummings takes us through a series of mistakes that led to his being arrested for treason and sent to prison. Out of this episode Cummings produced a unique work—a story of oppression, injustice, and imprisonment presented in a high-spirited manner as if it were a lark, a work of new linguistic energy that celebrates the individual and opposes all structures that stifle him.

This edition restores to the work much material that was deleted from the manuscript for the book's 1922 publication and is illustrated with drawings Cummings made while imprisoned in France.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871401502
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/17/1994
Series:	Twentieth Century Classics Series
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) was among the most influential, widely read, and revered modernist poets. He was also a playwright, a painter, and a writer of prose. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he studied at Harvard University and, during World War I, served with an ambulance corps in France. He spent three months in a French detention camp and subsequently wrote The Enormous Room, a highly acclaimed criticism of World War I. After the war, Cummings returned to the States and published his first collection of poetry, Tulips & Chimneys, which was characterized by his innovative style: pushing the boundaries of language and form while discussing love, nature, and war with sensuousness and glee. He spent the rest of his life painting, writing poetry, and enjoying widespread popularity and success.

Susan Cheever, a novelist and memoirist and the author of E. E. Cummings: A Life, lives in New York.

George J. Firmage edited many works by Cummings, including Erotic Poems; Complete Poems, 1904– 1962; and Fairy Tales.

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