The New Yorker and the Experimental Modernist Writer: The Career of Novelist, Critic, and Short Story Writer Robert M. Coates

The New Yorker, founded in 1925, was well-positioned to influence the reception of Anglo-American literary modernism. Although the magazine frequently paid attention to modernism, it did not make a special point of championing or publishing modernist writers. An illuminating exception in this regard was the experimental modernist writer Robert Myron Coates (1897–1973), who had a life-long association with the New Yorker, while also crafting a career in distinctly experimental writing. Coates’s work and career is emblematic of the interconnectedness between advanced modernism, its middlebrow manifestations, and American popular culture.