This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. In the autumn of 1917, zealous French police arrested two American ambulance corpsmen on suspicion of spying. One of the men was Edward Estlin Cummings, a young Harvard graduate and aspiring poet. The two were spent three months in the squalid detention center of La Ferté-Macé in Normandy. Cummings' fellow prisoners—the Machine-Fixer, the Zulu, the Young Skipper's Mate, the Wanderer, the Lobster—presented a human pageant reminiscent of Chaucer.