Although Robert M. Coates spent most of his life working as an art critic for the New Yorker, his literary career began in Paris where his first novel, The Eater of Darkness (1926), was published by Robert McAlmon's Contact Editions. Coates was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1897, the only child of an itinerant inventor/designer and sometime goldminer who moved his family across the country and back again during Coates's youth. After growing up in such diverse places as New York City, Rochester, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Seattle, and Christmas Crossing, Colorado, Coates attended Yale and served as a naval aviation cadet during World War I, though the war was over before he could get his wings. He returned to Yale after the armistice, graduated in 1919, and sailed for Europe in 1921, steerage class. Once there, he traveled in Corsica, Italy, and France, settling and writing for a time in Giverny...