SOURCE: Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Place, Self, and Writing: Toward a Poetics of Exile.” In Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity, pp. 1-37. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

In the following excerpt, Kennedy analyzes how Paris became for such writers as e.e. cummings, Ernest Hemingway, and Anaïs Nin a place that “inescapably reflects the creation of an exilic self.”

Shortly after returning from a prison camp in France, E. E. Cummings composed The Enormous Room (1922), an experimental novel recounting his ordeal as a Norton Harjes ambulance driver arrested (with his friend Slater Brown) on suspicion of German sympathy and incarcerated by French authorities. From his confinement with a motley assortment of men, Cummings created an exuberant, heterogeneous narrative mixing French with English, traditional allegory with naturalistic detail, and verbal portraiture with stream-of-consciousness impressionism. As implied by the title, the broad subject of this autobiographical account is...