{"product_id":"9781596749023","title":"The Enormous Room","description":"A rambunctious modern novel by the twentieth century's most inventive poet.  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBorn 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 \u003ci\u003eLa Patrie\u003c\/i\u003e, and he was summarily tossed into a French concentration camp at La Ferte-Mace in Normandy.  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eUnexpectedly, under the vilest conditions, Cummings found fulfillment of his ever-elusive quest for freedom. \u003ci\u003eThe Enormous Room\u003c\/i\u003e (1922), the fictional account of his four-month confinement, reads like a \u003ci\u003ePilgrim's Progress\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Enormous Room\u003c\/i\u003e 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).  ","brand":"Neeland Media LLC","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47147169874160,"sku":"9781596749023","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781596749023_p0.jpg?v=1763811158","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781596749023","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}