The Enormous Room, the title of poet E. E. Cummings’ 1922 autobiographical novel of World War I, is both literal and allegorical. Cummings served as an ambulance driver during the war and was arrested, along with his colleague William Slater Brown, by French authorities suspicious of anti-war sentiments found in some of Brown’s letters.  Upon the arrest in late August 1917, he was held at La Ferté-Macé, a French concentration camp, arriving five days after the local commissioners responsible for trials and pardons had left. When they returned in November, they granted Cummings, an official “suspect”, supervised release to the remote commune Oloron-Saint-Marie.  In the meantime, the French sent a letter to his father stating that Cummings had been lost at sea, with no further explanation. The title phrase refers to the large room where Cummings lived with some thirty other prisoners, and to the mental repository he created to house his memories of the characters and various adventures from his four-month imprisonment.  The book has been described as a “latter day Pilgrim’s Progress” and is considered a classic of the period. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives—The Enormous Room by e e cummings... Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality."