From Publishers Weekly
This nimble biography of the self-proclaimed " 'small eye poet,'" who united the avant-garde with tradition in his creations, works best as the story of a man in lifelong agitation about his desires and the demands of his real life. Born in Cambridge, Mass., to an established family, his father a Harvard instructor, Edward Estlin Cummings (1894–1962) came to reject his father's piety but was consumed by the guilt his upright upbringing engendered, a condition that affected his art and his interactions with women throughout his life. Cummings's student years at Harvard and his WWI involvement are covered at length, with particular attention to the publication of his first prose work, The Enormous Room, about being incarcerated in a French prison camp. Biographer Sawyer-Lauçanno (An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles) is especially strong in presenting Cummings's liaisons with women, particularly his two failed marriages, as stories of moral shortcomings, not the inevitabilities of youth. He offers enlightening analyses of Cummings's painting and writing, with an interesting take on the well-known "Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town." Sawyer-Lauçanno is so adept at weaving together the difficult elements of Cummings's life that it is the biographer's accomplishment, more than the poet's, that remains in the mind. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
More than four decades after his death, Edward Estlin Cummings remains one of the most beloved American poets, as well as one of the most misunderstood and underrated. As Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno suggests in this massive biography, Cummings probably is the victim of his popularity (which "at least in the academic mind . . . is a curse"), his failure to write "a book-length poem or a poetic sequence," and his strong opposition to the Soviet Union, which "lost him a good many supporters among the left-leaning critics." To that list should be added his penchant for sentimentality, which never wins any writer friends among the literati, who fancy themselves (against a great deal of evidence) clear-eyed and hard-bitten.All of which serves as a useful reminder that scholars and critics are wrong at least as often as they are right. As one who writes exceedingly rarely about poetry, I would not presume to step forward as an authority, but in my view -- or, perhaps more accurately, to my taste -- the three great American poets are Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and Cummings. Put American in italics, for apart from the beauty and power of their words, it is their Americanness that sets them apart. Each in his own way is what Sawyer-Lauçanno calls Cummings, "an American original" who speaks in a distinctly American voice and who addresses the American experience in ways that reflect deep roots in American soil and history.It is true that all three men were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, a breed that long since passed out of fashion (if not entirely out of power), and that poetry of a more recent vintage necessarily and properly reflects different experiences of America. Yet each of these three men deals with themes that are deeply and eternally American, some of which Sawyer-Lauçanno finds specifically in Cummings's work: "He consistently celebrated the ordinary, reviled pretentiousness, scourged conformity, ardently championed the individual (and nature) against the machine." Even in the age of mass society and mass culture, those are themes that have powerful meaning for and appeal to countless millions of Americans.There has not been a full biography of Cummings for a quarter-century: not since Dreams in the Mirror, by Richard S. Kennedy (1980), a solidly workmanlike book that is stronger on the life story than on criticism but that remains useful and is still in print, which probably is in itself evidence of Cummings's continuing popularity. Sawyer-Lauçanno's new biography does not supplant Kennedy's -- indeed relies rather too heavily on it -- but is written with deep affection for the poet and his work. If the author's enthusiasm for Cummings helps bring a few new readers to his work, that will be all to the good, for it offers immense pleasure and satisfaction.Cummings was born in Massachusetts in 1894 and died at his family's farm in New Hampshire in 1962. He was (like Frost) New England Yankee to the core. Both his parents' families had settled in the colonies long before the Revolution, Harvard was the family school, and Cummings was immersed in and faithful to Yankee tradition, as his poetry ("the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls") often reminds us. His father, a sociology instructor at Harvard who went on to become a prominent Unitarian minister in Cambridge, was a formidable presence whose "controlling behavior" made his only son uncomfortable but who inspired, at his death, what may be his son's greatest poem. It begins: my father moved through dooms of lovethrough sames of am through haves of give,singing each morning out of each nightmy father moved through depths of heightCummings went to Harvard, served as an ambulance driver in World War I -- he was briefly and unjustifiably imprisoned at a French "detention center for 'undesirables' and 'spies,' " the inspiration for his splendid work of prose, The Enormous Room (1922) -- and then settled in New York, eventually in a tiny apartment on Patchin Place in Greenwich Village. There he lived the literary and artistic life (he was a skilled, productive painter), not as a Village phony but as the real thing, a man whose life was totally given over to his art. The literary and artistic revolution sweeping through Europe had not yet reached the United States, so Cummings went to Paris to participate in it; like so many American intellectuals of his generation, he fell in love with the city and returned to it over and over. With steadfast concentration and total commitment, he developed a unique style -- often imitated, never matched -- that Sawyer-Lauçanno succinctly describes in analyzing one of his less-known poems: "What is identifiably Cummings style is all here: the uncapitalized 'i'; the use of parentheses and the ampersand; the spacing for visual and aural purposes; the punctuation for effect; the running of words together to create a wholeness out of separateness; the unique imagery ('hair-thin tints,' 'women coloured twilight'); the syntactical interruptions; and the creation of an adverb -- 'sayingly' out of another part of speech. And yet these are not just tricks for the sake of a unique semantic; the saying is integral to the meaning." Not until the 1950s did Cummings become a Famous Poet, with the publication of his Poems 1923-1954 and his emergence as a star on the college lecture circuit. His revolutionary style put off many readers for years, and his fierce individualism separated him from the literary crowd, though he had many friends in it. Money was a never-ending preoccupation, and there rarely was enough of it. His "extreme self-centeredness" led, not surprisingly, to a powerful sense of entitlement, so he took as a matter of course the support he received from his parents, his wives (there were three of them) and various benefactors, some of whom were astonishingly generous.He was in many ways a perpetual child, a point made more forcefully by Kennedy than by Sawyer-Lauçanno. He had a sublimely happy boyhood, surrounded by love and immersed in nature, and he always approached the world with innocence, even in poems sharply critical of war ("i sing of Olaf glad and big"), of humankind ("pity this busy monster,manunkind") or of his country ("next to of course god America i"). He was also a deeply sensual man who gradually overcame youthful "ambivalence as to whether sex was, as he had been taught throughout his childhood and adolescence, 'dirty' and forbidden," and had for much of his adulthood a lively, fulfilling sex life. He wrote many deliciously and somewhat sophomorically naughty poems ("may i feel said he"), and he wrote what may well be the greatest American love poem. It begins: somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyondany experience,your eyes have their silence:in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,or which i cannot touch because they are too nearOn the whole Cummings is well-served by Sawyer-Lauçanno, who treats his many eccentricities and self-indulgences kindly and who reads his work with care and understanding. What he says about Cummings's first book of poems, Tulips and Chimneys (1923) applies to all of his work: "Even when Cummings falters, he is still interesting, worth reading, and always has something to say. But perhaps, most important, his voice is always his own: genuine, unique, and resonant." He is not an especially graceful writer, but he gets the job done.It should be noted that this biography is based, apart from Cummings's work, almost entirely on secondary sources; Sawyer-Lauçanno insists that it is "largely the result of archival research," but there can be no question that he relies heavily on Kennedy's biography. As a case in point, I was stopped cold by Sawyer-Lauçanno's account of an important event in Cummings's life of which I have personal knowledge. In the spring of 1935 he gave his first public reading, at Bennington College in Vermont. My mother, who was then 20 years old and an ardent reader of Cummings's poetry (she remained one all her life), was in the audience, which received him with wild enthusiasm. It was an occasion she never forgot and loved to talk about, so I read Sawyer-Lauçanno's account of it with particular interest. Since his Notes make no reference to anything in his two-paragraph account, I referred to Kennedy to see if he'd gotten it right.A little too right, it seems. Here the two authors describe Cummings's response to the students' lavish, noisy welcome, in which they recited en masse his famous poem about the death of Buffalo Bill. Kennedy: "He was so overcome by the whole display that he did not know what to say. Flustered, he took the handkerchief from his breast pocket and waved it at them." Sawyer-Lauçanno: "Flummoxed, he simply stood in the wings. . . . Finally, after the third complete recitation of the poem he walked onto the stage, plucked a handkerchief from his breast pocket and waved at the adoring crowd." There are, of course, only so many ways to tell the same story, and each account supplies details that the other does not. But Sawyer-Lauçanno's failure to identify his sources for this specific incident left me wondering about his sources elsewhere. No doubt a more thorough Notes section would have cleared up the mystery, and his editor and publisher are to be faulted for not insisting on one. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
This thorough and passionate biography reminds us of a time when poets led more exciting lives. Cummings the poet (and painter) plunged into his artistic pursuits with great determination, spending the rest of his time with artists of like caliber from New York's Patchin Place to the burgeoning surrealist demimonde of 1920s Paris. Cummings the ideologue felt his views deeply, including, as the book lays bare, his anti-Semitism and anti-Communism. Cummings the romancer drifted from one lover to another, finally settling down with a woman he never legally married. Sawyer-Laucanno provides extensive detail about Cummings' career without losing his eye for winning anecdotes, making his biography a terrific source for cocktail-party small talk. Discussions of Cummings' groundbreaking works, though not groundbreaking themselves, always sensitively link the well-chosen poems to events in the life. Foundational narratives, such as that of the absurd World War I imprisonment that led to his memoir, The Enormous Room, are crisply laid out. In all, continuous and respectful honesty makes this a bracing, fiery, and memorable narrative, homage, and reportage all at once. Max Winter
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

ForeWord
"Surely the definitive study of the poet and his work"

Library Journal, August 15, 2004. Starred Review.
"All academic and public libraries with an interest in poetry will want to acquire this biography of a modernist giant."

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2004. Starred Review
"Well-researched, comprehensive, and essential to understanding the artist and the artistry."

Boston Globe, October, 10, 2004
"[Cummings] is more than merely studied, but uncorked, left to breathe, and tasted in the fullness of his genius."

Washington Post, October 17, 2004
"Sawyer-Lauçanno's new biography...is written with deep affection for the poet and his work."

Harvard Crimson, October 29, 2004
"This tension [...] will keep Cummings’ poetry, as well as his biography, relevant far into the future. "

Christian Science Monitor, November 16, 2004
"[...] a responsible, adept, and necessary contribution to the body of secondary work about one of America's greatest poets."

[Toronto] National Post, December 4, 2004
Sawyer-Laucanno's appreciation of Cummings' oeuvre is infectious. [Cumming]'s importance is underrated by scholars--if not by his scores of fans.

Book Description
The Long-Awaited, Intimate Portrait of an Extraordinary Life Throughout the forty-five years of his professional writing life, Edward Estlin Cummings consistently celebrated the ordinary, reviled pretentiousness, scourged conformity, experimented boldly with words and syntax and punctuation, and wrote some of the most erotic and tender love poetry in the English language. Yet Cummings could also be difficult, truculent, opinionated, wrong-headed, emotional, bigoted and egotistical. Dubbed by Ezra Pound as "Whitman’s one living descendant," Cummings sang of himself and of America in a unique voice, as resonant now as it was a half-century ago. Charismatic and famous among the famous, Cummings always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, and was a major presence wherever he resided, whether in Cambridge, Europe or New York. He counted some of the most important artists of his time as friends: Pound, Hemingway, Dylan Thomas and many more. For nearly half a century, the personal papers, journals and diaries of Edward Estlin Cummings were kept from public view. These documents reveal far more about the inner life of the famous poet and painter than has ever been known. Now, noted biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno presents the first, definitive, revelatory life story of E.E. Cummings (1894–1962), an American original. For E.E. Cummings: A Biography, the author had unprecedented access to all of Cummings’s papers—anguished diary entries, reflections on consultations with two psychoanalysts, an autobiographical novel, and a carefully prepared manuscript containing more than one hundred blatantly erotic poems. In the words of William Corbett, author of Boston Vermont and Don’t Think Look, "E.E. Cummings, Yankee individualist and, rare for an American poet, satirist is here in full. This means warts and all, but Sawyer-Lauçanno has not come to judge. In this readable and absorbing life he has paid Cummings the honor of clear-eyed candor." Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno paints a full and memorable portrait of this extraordinary American poet.

From the Publisher
"Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno’s biography of Cummings is revealing, exhaustive, and surely definitive--a bold, upper case study of America’s notorious lower-case poet."--Billy Collins "With meticulous research and attention to detail, Sawyer-Lauçanno strips bare the life of the great poet, so that we feel we know Cummings' every thought, every woman kissed, every twist and quirk in the synthesis of genius."--Alan Lightman, author of Reunion, The Diagnosis (National Book Award finalist) and Einstein’s Dreams "This book makes [Cummings’] life story lucidly comprehensible for the first time. It deserves first place on any short list of Cummings scholarship."--Lawrence Ferlinghetti "This new biography of Estlin Cummings surpasses the first two in richness of detail and depth of interpretation. It goes a long way toward showing that he was a painter who wrote poems, a moralist swamped in his own sensuality, an ironist in the manner of Thoreau, and, as Ezra Pound said, Whitman's only heir."--Guy Davenport, author of The Death of Picasso, Objects on a Table and Da Vinci’s Bicycle "An impressive amount of labor will have gone into writing this meticulously researched biography but, such is the author's lightness of touch, that it does not show. The biography is as revealing of the author's own love for and intimate knowledge of the art of writing poetry as that of his subject."--Anita Desai , author of Clear Light of Day and Fasting, Feasting "A most readable account of E.E. Cummings' extraordinary life, both as poet and person. Ezra Pound called him the Catullus of their age and certainly his work broke initial ground for my own generation. Never simply this or that, this present biography attempts and succeeds in allowing its complex subject to be real. What a pleasure!"--Robert Creeley

About the Author
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno's books include The Continual Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris, 1944-1960 and An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is also a poet and translator, and the long-time Writer-in-Residence at MIT. For E.E. Cummings: A Biography, he had unprecedented access to all of Cummings's papers, many of which had been previously sealed. He lives in Turners Falls, Massachusetts.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Throughout the forty-five years of his professional writing life, Edward Estlin Cummings consistently celebrated the ordinary, reviled pretentiousness, scourged conformity, experimented boldly with words and syntax and punctuation, and wrote some of the most erotic and tender love poetry in the English language. Yet Cummings could also be difficult, truculent, opinionated, wrong-headed, emotional, bigoted and egotistical. Dubbed by Ezra Pound as "Whitman's one living descendant," Cummings sang of himself and of America in a unique voice, as resonant now as it was a half-century ago.

Charismatic and famous among the famous, Cummings always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, and was a major presence wherever he resided, whether in Cambridge, Europe or New York. He counted some of the most important artists of his time as friends: Pound, Hemingway, Dylan Thomas and many more.

For nearly half a century, the personal papers, journals and diaries of Edward Estlin Cummings were kept from public view. These documents reveal far more about the inner life of the famous poet and painter than has ever been known. Now, noted biographer Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno presents the first, definitive, revelatory life story of E.E. Cummings, an American original.

For E.E. Cummings: A Biography, the author had unprecedented access to all of Cummings's papers -- anguished diary entries, reflections on consultations with two psychoanalysts, an autobiographical novel, and a carefully prepared manuscript containing more than one hundred blatantly erotic poems.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

This nimble biography of the self-proclaimed "`small eye poet,'" who united the avant-garde with tradition in his creations, works best as the story of a man in lifelong agitation about his desires and the demands of his real life. Born in Cambridge, Mass., to an established family, his father a Harvard instructor, Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) came to reject his father's piety but was consumed by the guilt his upright upbringing engendered, a condition that affected his art and his interactions with women throughout his life. Cummings's student years at Harvard and his WWI involvement are covered at length, with particular attention to the publication of his first prose work, The Enormous Room, about being incarcerated in a French prison camp. Biographer Sawyer-Lau anno (An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles) is especially strong in presenting Cummings's liaisons with women, particularly his two failed marriages, as stories of moral shortcomings, not the inevitabilities of youth. He offers enlightening analyses of Cummings's painting and writing, with an interesting take on the well-known "Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town." Sawyer-Lau anno is so adept at weaving together the difficult elements of Cummings's life that it is the biographer's accomplishment, more than the poet's, that remains in the mind. Agent, Roslyn Targ. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

E.E. Cummings's poetry cannot be mistaken for anything else it is perhaps the most distinctive verse in the English language. Cummings was equally a painter and a poet, and his poetry gains its great originality from the artist's strong visual sense. In fact, he anticipated by decades postmodernism in his use of language and the theater of the absurd in his plays. A poet and a writer-in-residence at MIT, Sawyer-Lau anno (The Continual Pilgrimage) emphasizes the relation of the private man to his work, offering fresh insights into the grand optical arrangement of Cummings's books, which are lost when the poems are read in anthologies. Although the current standard biography of Cummings, Richard S. Kennedy's Dreams in the Mirror (2d ed. 1982), will remain useful for its broader perspectives on the poet and his times, all academic and public libraries with an interest in poetry will want to acquire this biography of a modernist giant. Vince Brewton, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews