NYRB Classics: E.E. Cummings's "The Enormous Room," with Nicholas Delbanco & Susan Cheever

A discussion of E.E. Cummings's novel "The Enormous Room" - in a new edition from NYRB Classics - with the book's introducer, Nicholas Delbanco, and author, biographer, and historian Susan Cheever. This virtual event, brought to you as part of our ongoing series with our friends at New York Review Books, took place on Zoom. To purchase a copy of the book (and support Community Bookstore): www.communityb...
About the book:
In 1917, after the entry of America into World War I, E. E. Cummings, a recent graduate of Harvard College, volunteered to serve on an ambulance corps in France. He arrived in Paris with a new friend, William Slater Brown, and they set about living it up in the big city before heading off to their assignment. Once in the field, they wrote irreverent letters about their experiences, which attracted the attention of the censors and ultimately led to their arrest. They were held for months in a military detention camp, sharing a single large room with a host of fellow detainees. It is this experience that Cummings relates in lightly fictionalized form in "The Enormous Room," a book in which a tale of woe becomes an occasion of exuberant mischief. A free-spirited novel that displays the same formal swagger as his poems, a stinging denunciation of the stupidity of military authority, and a precursor to later books like "Catch-22" and "MASH," Cummings’s novel is an audacious, uninhibited, lyrical, and lasting contribution to American literature.
Nicholas Delbanco is the author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, "Why Writing Matters," the essay collection "Curiouser and Curiouser," and the novel "It Is Enough." He is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. He lives in New York City and Cape Cod.
Susan Cheever is an acclaimed, best-selling author whose sixteen published books and dozens of essays have built on the brilliant legacy of her father, the novelist and short story writer John Cheever whose stories will be the subject of her upcoming book "When All the Men Wore Hats." She has published five novels, five memoirs, and three additional biographies including the best-selling "American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau, their lives, their loves, their work," and "My Name is Bill, Bill Wilson--His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous." Her book about American history as seen through the lens of alcoholism "Drinking in America: Our Secret History" was published in 2015 and longlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction. Her biography of the poet E.E. Cummings was published in February of 2014. She has also taught at Yale, Sarah Lawrence, Brown University, the New School and Bennington.