The Enormous Room

As America entered World War I in 1917 Harvard College graduate E. E. Cummings offered his services to an ambulance corps in France. He arrived in Paris with a new acquaintance named William Slater Brown and the two of them immediately started having a good time in the city before leaving for their task. They penned outrageous letters describing their experiences after being deployed which caught the censors notice and finally resulted in their detention. They were kept for months in a military prison living in a single huge room with a large number of other prisoners. literature.