Edward Estlin Cummings was an American poet, who was one of the most radically experimental and inventive writers of the 20th century. Some distinctive features of Cummings's poetry is the abandonment of uppercase letters and his use of grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation. He had his own unique style of writing unlike any other writer in history.
E.E. Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 14, 1894. Early in his life, Cummings parents, Edward and Rebecca Clarke Cummings, encouraged him to develop his creative writing skills. In 1911, Cummings entered Harvard College, where his father was a teacher. In 1916, Cummings receives MA from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. .
After Harvard, Cummings moved to New York City to work for a mail-order publishing company. In 1917, Cummings volunteered to serve in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance group in France. During Cummings service, he met William Slater Brown, who became his life long friend. They were both assigned to ambulance duty on Noyon sector. Later Brown's letters from home aroused suspicions in the French army censor. On September 21, 1917, Brown was arrested along with Cummings, who refused to separate himself from Brown. They were both imprisoned for three months at a French detention camp. In 1922, Cummings wrote a book about his experience in the detention camp called, The Enormous Room. The Enormous Room tells of his account of imprisonment in the French detention camp. The main theme of this book is maintaining dignity in a situation where it all seems to be lost.
After the First World War was over, Cummings went to Paris to study art. When he returned home to New York in 1924, Cummings found himself a celebrity for The Enormous Room, "Tulips", and "Chimneys". In 1931, Cummings published a collection of drawings and paintings titled CIOPW, (an acronym for the materials he used: charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, and watercolors).
