The Enormous Room
In 1917 Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver in France, and within months he was arrested on suspicion of disloyalty after refusing to disown a friend’s anti-war letters. This autobiographical novel recounts the four months he spent in a makeshift military detention camp at La Ferte-Mace, held without charge in a single great room crowded with prisoners from across Europe. Rather than dwell on grievance, Cummings turns his captivity into a celebration of the outcasts and eccentrics around him, rendered in the restless, playful, wildly inventive prose that would soon mark his poetry. It stands among the finest American books to come out of the First World War. This free PDF and EPUB edition brings his early prose masterpiece to new readers.
