Cheever begins this dramatic portrait of modernist poet E. E. Cummings with her memories of Cummings performing one of his famed readings and of listening intently in the backseat as her father, fiction writer John Cheever, drove the poet, his good friend, back to Greenwich Village. Cheever analyzes Cummings’ subterranean anger, excessive carousing, and flagrant anti-authoritarianism in France after enlisting during WWI, which landed him in a camp for “undesirables”.

Cheever incisively dissects Cummings’ two disastrous marriages and the shocking abduction of his adored only child, Nancy Thayer, who became an artist and poet unaware of who her father actually was. With Ezra Pound as friend and mentor, Cummings deftly created “wild, expressive syntax” and wielded his signature lower-case “i” as critical response ran hot and cold, and ardent fans left flowers on his doorstep. Cheever’s reconsideration of Cummings and his work charms, rattles, and enlightens in emulation of his radically disarming, tender, sexy, and furious poems.

It's a major reassessment of the life and work of one of America's preeminent twentieth-century poets. -- e. e. cummings' radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax resulted in his creation of a new, idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. And while there was critical disagreement about his work (Edmund Wilson called it ''hideous,'' while Malcolm Cowley called him ''unsurpassed in his field''), at the time of his death in 1962, at age sixty-seven, he was, after Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in the United States. -- Now, in this new biography, Susan Cheever traces the development of the poet and his work. She takes us from cummings' seemingly idyllic childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through his years at Harvard (rooming with Dos Passos and befriending Malcolm Cowley) where the radical verse of Ezra Pound lured the young writer away from the politeness of the traditional nature poem and towards a more adventurous, sexually conscious form. We follow cummings to Paris in 1917 and, finally, to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day, including Marianne Moore and Hart Crane. -- Rich and illuminating, E. E. Cummings: A Life is a revelation of the man and the poet, and a brilliant reassessment of the poet and his legacy.