From a review of a new bio of e.e. cummings.

[Gary Webb]

Cummings used his prison experience as the basis for his novel, The Enormous Room(1922), about which F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "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."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings

That’s quite an endorsement! 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 12, 2020, at 11:08 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Pynchon uses the simple normal phrase to describe the room where GR opens
> but has anyone read cummings' novel for possible uses or inspiration?  "Vivid
> character sketches".....in spiritual terms including a pilgrim, etc...
> 
> 
> "Quite a different Cummings emerges from “The Enormous Room” (1922), his
> imaginative account of his and Brown’s internment in the French prison camp
> at La Ferté-Macé, starting in September 1917. Brown had written letters to
> a friend in the States which the authorities deemed subversive. When they
> came to arrest Brown, Anderson spotted a chance to rid himself of both men,
> and gave them the innocent Cummings as well. Cummings’s account of their
> ordeal is wry and imaginative, enumerating the petty tyrannies of his
> captors and the absurdist doldrums of the camp. Named for the large
> communal space where the prisoners slept, the book was something of a
> command performance. His father had worked feverishly for his son’s release
> and demanded a written account, in return for “financial support.”
> 
> “The Enormous Room” comprises a number of vivid character sketches, ranging
> from Cummings’s eccentric and sympathetic fellow prisoners, to the
> officials he depicts as soulless drones. He frames his ordeal in spiritual
> terms, reserving the name Apollyon, the “foul fiend” from Bunyan’s
> “Pilgrim’s Progress,” for his nemesis. Cummings’s rants about his fellows
> are uproarious, but their behavior imparts a sobering lesson: “It struck me
> at the time as intensely interesting that, in the case of a certain type of
> human being, the more cruel are the miseries inflicted upon him the more
> cruel does he become toward anyone who is so unfortunate as to be weaker or
> more miserable than himself.”
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l