E(dward) E(stlin) Cummings (1894–1962) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a Congregationalist minister and a Harvard faculty member. Cummings graduated from Harvard in 1915 and earned an M.A. in 1916. When the United States entered World War I, Cummings joined the ambulance corps in France but was imprisoned by the French for his outspoken letters home. The Enormous Room (1922) is his prose account of the experience. Intervention by his father in the form of a letter to President Woodrow Wilson freed him, and Cummings found the experience of being made a prisoner by one's own side outrageous, yet funny.

After the war, he made a life primarily in Greenwich Village in New York City, working full time as a poet and painter. Prizes, royalties, commissions, and a small allowance from his mother supported his independence. Cummings's work is known for its radical innovations in punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammar. Some of his poems seem literally to explode into fragments across the page, for he often arranged letters, words, and phrases in unique ways to make a visual as well as a verbal impact. In keeping with his innovative style, Cummings often had his name printed in all lowercase letters: e. e. cummings.

His works include four volumes of well-received poetry in the 1920s and a book of collected poems toward the end of the 1930s. During the 1950s, he lectured and read on the college campus circuit. In 1950, he was honored with a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for "great achievement" over a period of years. He received a special citation from the National Book Award Committee in 1955 and the Bollingen Prize for poetry at Yale in 1957.