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 Skipper's Mate, the Wanderer, the Lobster--presented a human pageant reminiscent of Chaucer.