Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 - September 3, 1962), popularly known as E.E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. Because of the typography used in many of his works it has become a widespread tradition for his name to be presented in lower case as e.e. cummings, though he himself continued to use uppercase letters in signing his own name. His body of work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. Cummings is associated with modernist free-form poetry. Much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax and uses lower-case spellings for poetic expression. He is remembered as a preeminent voice of 20^th century poetry, as well as one of the most popular.