The Enormous Room (edit title)

Shelfari edited the description of The Enormous Room Sunday, August 2 2009.

• A rambunctious modern novel by the twentieth century's most inventive poet. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, Edward Estlin Cummings rebelled against the prevailing values of his Harvard and Unitarianism-- steeped milieu. His relentless search for personal freedom led him to Greenwich Village in early 1917, where he established himself as a Modernist, composing his sui generis poems and abstract paintings. Later that year, he impulsively joined the war, serving in a Red Cross ambulance unit on the Western Front. His free-spirited, combative ways, however, soon got him tagged as a possible enemy of La Patrie , and he was summarily tossed into a French concentration camp at La Ferte-Mace in Normandy. Unexpectedly, under the vilest conditions, Cummings found fulfillment of his ever-elusive quest for freedom. The Enormous Room (1922), the fictional account of his four-month confinement, reads like a Pilgrim's Progress of the spirit, a journey into dispossession, to a place among the most debased and deprived of human creatures. Yet Cummings's hopeful tone reflects the essential paradox of his experience: to lose everything--all comforts, all possessions, all rights and privileges--is to become free, and so to be saved. Drawing on the diverse voices of his colorful prisonmates--Emile the Bum, the Fighting Sheeney, One-Eyed Dah-veed--Cummings weaves a "crazy-quilt" of language, which makes The Enormous Room one of the most evocative instances of the Modernist spirit and technique, as well as "one of the very best of the war-books" (T. E. Lawrence).

Shelfari edited the contributors of The Enormous Room Monday, July 27 2009.

• Added a contributor: E. E. Cummings: (Primary Author)

Shelfari edited the first sentence of The Enormous Room Thursday, July 16 2009.

• WE HAD SUCCEEDED, my friend B. and I, in dispensing with almost three of our six months' engagement as Conducteurs Volantaires, Section Sanitaire Vingt-et-Un, Ambulance Norton Harjes, Croix Rouge Americaine, and at the Moment which subsequent experience served to capitalize had just finished the unlovely job of cleaning and greasing (nettoyer is the proper word) the own private flivver of the chef de section, a gentleman by the convenient name of Mr. A.