E.E. Cummings 
The Enormous Room (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) 

In the autumn of 1917, zealous French police arrested two American ambulance corpsmen on suspicion of spying. One of the men was Edward Estlin Cummings, a young Harvard graduate and aspiring poet. The two were spent three months in the squalid detention center of La Ferté-Macé in Normandy. Cummings fellow prisoners–the Machine-Fixer, the Zulu, the Young Skippers Mate, the Wanderer, the Lobster–presented a human pageant reminiscent of Chaucer.

About the author

E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) was a radical individualist who epitomized the modernist revolt against conventional norms, whether artistic or social. His bold experiments with syntax and form became one of the most recognizable of the twentieth century. He moved between Greenwich Village and Paris after World War I, and was a principal figure of the Lost Generation.