Making of Americans in 1930 and reviewed her work favourably in the New Yorker. Coates’s acquaintance with the European literary avant-garde had a lasting impact on his literary career. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, next to writing for the New Yorker, he continued to be passionate about literary form and style and remained much interested in literary experimentation. He published a short story in the first issue of the avant-garde magazine transition, founded by Eugene Jolas and Maria MacDonald in April 1927 and published two more stories in transition in 1928. After finishing the highly experimental novel The Eater of Darkness, he worked on a second avant-garde novel, Yesterday’s Burdens, which would appear with the Macaulay Company in 1933. A third experimental novel, The Bitter Season, appeared in 1946, which was followed by Wisteria Cottage, a superbly written crime novel which contained several stylistic features not generally associated with the genre such as parentheses, repetition and stream-of-consciousness writing. Also, like much of his earlier work, Wisteria Cottage resonates with genres of popular culture such as the crime novel and the film noir,< creating a bridge between high and low culture much practiced by the European avant-garde, from cubism to surrealism. Coates and The New Yorker Coates returned to New York in 1926 and found employment as a staff writer at the newly founded New Yorker in 1927. After interviews with James Thurber, who would become a close friend, and founding editor Harold Ross, he was hired on the spot. Coates’s appointment at the New Yorker was the start of a life-long association. Next to James Thurber, who became a particularly close friend, Coates developed friendships with several of the New Yorker’s editors and associates, among them E.B. and Katharine White, Wolcott Gibbs, Dorothy Parker, Janet Flanner, Wolcott Gibbs, St. Clair McKelway, Gus Lobrano, Russell Maloney, Ann Honeycut, Sid Perelman, and later, William Maxwell and Brendan Gill. Coates resigned from his position as staff writer in 1932, soon after his move to Gaylordsville, Connecticut, in 1931, but continued to write for the New Yorker until 1967. During his many years of involvement with the magazine he contributed to many different departments—among them “The Talk of the Town,” “Notes and Comment,” “Profiles” and “The Reporter-at-Large.” Coates was the magazine’s book critic from 1930 to 1933 and became their art critic in 1937, a position that he held until 1967. From 1932 onwards