Many of the Americans in Paris in the twenties may have had some occasion to encounter French law, and several even spent a few hours in jail. But few began their lives in France by being arrested and sent to detention camp, as E. E. Cummings did. For Cummings it was the source of his first book, The Enormous Room (1922), which recounts the experience and turns it into the source of one of Cummings's abiding themes, the victory of the innocent individual over a corrupt system. Despite his difficulties with French bureaucracy, Cummings maintained his love for France and continued to visit Paris during the twenties and thirties.

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Rebecca Clarke Cummings and Edward Cummings. Edward Cummings taught sociology and political science at Harvard, where he became friends with William James, until 1900 when he was ordained minister of South Congregational...