A bildungsroman detailing the three months Cummings and his friend, B., spent in a French prison during WWI (due to B.'s less than complimentary accounts of the French authorities' management of the war effort in his letters home). This is held up as a sort-of spiritual predecessor to Catch-22, and Cummings can be quite funny in his skewering of the prison administration. He is also, of course, a poet, and there are some beautiful passages and