During his unusually varied career, Coates explored many different genres and styles of writing and produced three highly remarkable experimental novels, The Eater of Darkness (1926), Yesterday’s Burdens (1933) and The Bitter Season (1946).
The magazine printed more than a hundred of his short stories many of which were collected in three anthologies; All the Year Round (1943), The Hour after Westerly (1957) and The Man Just ahead of You (1964).
Also, from 1937 to 1967, Coates was the New Yorker’s art critic and coined the term “abstract expressionism” in 1946 in reference to the works of Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and others.
[5] Anthony Boucher praised Coates as "one of the most persuasive recorders of the unaccountable and disturbing moment," singling out his fantasy stories for their "haunting tone of uncertainty and dislocation.
As a result, as Coates recalls in his book of memoirs, “everywhere we went, I was, for a period at least, the new boy, the outsider.”[11] Even during the three years that the family stayed in Cripple Creek (1905-1908), they were far from stationary.
Coates also was a member of the literary fraternity “Chi Delta Theta” where he found himself in the company of poet Stephen Vincent Benét, playwrights Thornton Wilder and Philip Barry, and future founder and editor of Time, Henry Luce.
In the winter of 1921, Coates sailed to Europe and settled down on 9 Rue de la Grande-Chaumière in Montparnasse, on Paris’s Left Bank.
He published highly experimental prose sketches, with strong influences from expressionism and Dadaism, in the expatriate little magazines Gargoyle, Broom and Secession.
As he wrote in a New Yorker article: “As a young man I went to France—on what I always thought was my own initiative, until the social historians got to delving into the period and I learned that I’d actually been following, sheeplike, in the tracks of a mass manifestation called ‘the literary exodus’ of a group called ‘the lost generation.’ It is always unsettling to be told that one’s motives are not what one thinks they are.”[16] In Paris, Coates developed a special relationship with Gertrude Stein, the matriarch of modernism who owned the famous salon on 27 Rue de Fleurus.
[25] Another noticeable outcome was a public altercation, in the pages of the New Yorker, with fellow novelist Ernest Hemingway, after Coates’s review of Death in the Afternoon as a “strange book, childish, here and there, in its small-boy wickedness of language; bitter, and even morbid om its preoccupation with fatality.”[26][27] From the early 1930s onwards, Coates became increasingly interested in developing a new, urban, type of short story.
Coates's often starkly realistic and psychologically dark short stories of the 1930s and 1940s made a significant contribution to the magazine’s developing stature as an organ for quality fiction.
A third full-fledged experimental novel, The Bitter Season, appeared in 1946 with Harcourt, Brace and was written against the background of World War II and Coates’s own divorce from Elsa Kirpal.
All three novels share a passionate interest in conveying the mood and atmosphere of New York City as experienced by individual onlookers-participants at a certain moment in history through experiments in literary form.
His first three novels are alike in that they seek to summon aesthetically a particular cultural or historical moment as witnessed and experienced by an individual who is both unique and representative, both a keen reporter and a harried participant.
Coates’s interest in violence—a preoccupation that he shared with such contemporaries writers as Thurber, Dos Passos, Wolfe, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hammett and West—had been evident throughout his career.
Before Wisteria Cottage, Coates had paid ample attention to beatings, rape, murder, car accidents, embezzlement, and suicide.
In all of Coates’s previous accounts of murder (except for the short story “The Net,” which is clearly a study for Wisteria Cottage), men had been the victims, not women.