A Brief Biography of E. E. Cummings

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Edward Estlin Cummings also known as e. e. cummings was born on October 14, 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cummings was considered to be a shaper and mover of the 20th century poetry world. As well as poet, Cummings was also a painter, playwright and author. Cummings was raised in an upper class household, with strong family values and an emphasis on education. His parents were Edward Cummings (the first Sociology professor at Harvard University turned Unitarian minister) and Rebecca Cummings. Cummings also had a younger sister named Elizabeth. Cummings attended both Cambridge Latin School and Harvard University where he studied languages and later earned an MA from Harvard’s school of Arts and Science. The poet spent a lot of time on his family’s “Joy Farm” in Silver Lake, New Hampshire where he also died in 1962. The house was later marked as a historic landmark in 1971 by the state of New Hampshire. Cummings was married two times, both short and unsuccessful. His first union, in 1924, started as a love affair with one of Cummings friend’s wife, Elaine Orr. Cumming and Elaine had a daughter Nancy, 6 years prior to their marriage. Elaine left Cummings nine short months after the two wed and ran away with her daughter to Ireland, where she later married a rich Irish Broker. Cummings second marriage was to Anne Minnerly Barton in 1929. That marriage lasted 3 years before Barton filed for a Mexican divorce. It was said that the divorce wasn’t properly recognized by the United States. Not long after Cummings second marriage, he fell in love with Marion Morehouse. The two spent 30 years together until Cummings death in 1962. In 1917, during the First World War, Cummings and a friend William Slater Brown went to Paris to work as ambulance drivers. During that time, both men were thrown in jail for expressing their pacifist views in which the French

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