Anyone who passed through the eighth grade knows e. e. cummings as the poet who loathed capital letters, but his output was actually much more varied. For example, the Unitarian-born, Harvard-educated Cummings wrote a play based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a "travelogue" on his trip through Soviet Russia, and a book of fairy-tales, which were published posthumously. He also contributed lengthy profiles of bohemian superstars to Vanity Fair.

In fact, Cummings’s first offering, published in 1922, was not a playful bit of verse but a novel called The Enormous Room. Long before he was "our generation’s beloved heretic," as Susan Cheever puts it in her upcoming biography E. E. Cummings: A Life, Edward Estlin Cummings was a whip-smart Harvard graduate preparing to drive an army ambulance for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, a unit of the American Red Cross, in France during World War I.

Things didn’t go quite as planned, though -- they often don’t during wartime -- and Cummings found himself stranded for five weeks in Paris due to a bureaucratic mix-up. The month-long repose, however, was not wasted: during this time, Cummings fell in love with the city of Paris, and became close friends with a fellow ambulance driver, William Slater Brown, who was stuck in Paris thanks to the same militaristic oversight. Brown came from a similar background -- he was an educated, upper-middle class Bostonian -- and he and Cummings shared dissenting views about France’s stance in the war. Unfortunately for them both, Brown made his views obvious in his letters home, and the two were imprisoned -- Cummings for four months, Brown for seven -- at a detention camp in Normandy.

The Enormous Room begins with Cummings’s chaperoned trip to La Ferté-Macé prison and ends (spoiler alert!) with his release. The title of the book refers to the one enormous room in the prison where Cummings lived with Slater Brown (known throughout the novel as B) and a host of other odd, lovable prisoners, who are given names like The Young Pole, the Zulu, and John the Baigneur. (A working knowledge of French will be very helpful in the reading of this book.) Across the road -- and visible from the window in The Enormous Room -- is a prison for women, many of whom are assumed to be prostitutes.

In many ways, Cummings delights in interacting with such a diverse crowd, and what could have been a traumatizing experience turns, instead, to a lively celebration of humanity. "I gained all sorts of highly enlightening information concerning the lives, habits and likes of half a dozen of as fine companions as it has ever been my luck to meet or, so far as I can now imagine, ever will be," he writes. "In prison one learns several millions things -- if one is l’americain from Mass-a-chu-setts."

As is evident here and throughout the novel, Cummings was already comfortable tinkering with conventional syntax. It wasn't all fun and games, though, particularly for Cummings’s parents, who received a letter in error informing him that his son had been killed at sea. When the truth was discovered, Cummings Senior petitioned for his son’s release, which was granted with haste. (Because Brown had actually written of his distaste for France’s actions during la guerre, he was kept incarcerated for longer.)

To find out more about Cummings’s absurd war experiences, his later partnership with the "first supermodel," and the time he and John Cheever went to White Castle, check out Susan Cheever’s new biography, which is due out February 11.