the field And flutter in the heather. Know that when captive you shall yield We'll both be bound together. Expatriation 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. There he found himself in the heart of the bohemian Latin Quarter, much frequented by other American expatriates. Between 1921 and 1923, he established contacts with literary figures such as Arthur Moss, Florence Gilliam, Matthew Josephson, Malcolm Cowley, Kathleen Cannell, Harold Loeb, Ford Madox Ford, Ernest Hemingway and Laurence Vail. He published highly experimental prose sketches, with strong influences from expressionism and Dadaism, in the expatriate little magazines Gargoyle, Broom and Secession. In 1926, Coates’s first novel, The Eater of Darkness, was published in Paris by Robert McAlmon’s publishing company Contact Editions. Although he was part of the “lost generation,” Coates never liked to be grouped in that particular category. 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.” In Paris, Coates developed a special relationship with Gertrude Stein, the matriarch of modernism who owned the famous salon on 27 Rue de Fleurus. According to Stein’s biographer, Coates had been “a Rue-de-Fleurus favorite”. Stein and Coates each made several attempts to further the other’s literary career: Stein recommended Coates twice for a John Simon Guggenheim Award, in 1928 and in 1935, and reviewed his second novel, Yesterday’s Burdens, for Scribner’s Magazine. Convinced of Coates’s creative originality, she praised him in her notorious Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as one of the very few writers who “have an individual sense of words.” It followed that “Gertrude Stein took a very deep interest in Coates’s work as soon as he showed it to her. She said he was the one young man who had an individual rhythm, his words made a sound to the eyes, most people’s words don’t.” In turn, Coates tried to persuade the Macaulay Publishing Company in New York to publish an abridged version of The