he also developed a career as a New Yorker short story writer, submitting over a hundred short stories between 1921 and 1967. In all, as New Yorker scholar Ben Yagoda has pointed out, Coates wrote “more words for the magazine than anyone else, with the possible exception of [E.B.] White and [Wolcott] Gibbs.” One of the literary relationships that came out of Coates’s stint as the New Yorker’s book reviewer was his close friendship with Nathanael West, whom he met after his enthusiastic review of Miss Lonelyhearts. 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.” From the early 1930s onwards, Coates became increasingly interested in developing a new, urban, type of short story. The New Yorker became one of Coates’s favourite organs of publication and his reputation as a short story writer grew considerably. By 1943, when his first collection of short stories All the Year Round came out, several of his stories had appeared in prize anthologies: “The Fury” in the O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories of 1937, “Passing Through” in the Best Short Stories of 1939, “Let’s Not Talk About it Now” in O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories of 1940 and “The Net” in Best Short Stories of 1941. In addition, three Coates stories had been reprinted in the first anthology of New Yorker fiction, Short Stories from the New Yorker, 1925-1940. The anthology (which contained 68 stories, including Coates’s “The Fury,” “The Net” and “A Different World”) got rave reviews from the New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times and The Saturday Review and led to the recognition of The New Yorker as a major vehicle of high quality fiction, and an important influence besides. 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. Coates as Novelist Coates’s first novel, The Eater of Darkness, was published in Paris in 1926 and was republished in New York in 1929 by Macaulay, where it was promoted and hailed as a Dada novel by the critics. Macaulay also published Coates’s second novel, Yesterday’s Burdens, in 1933, which