Robert M. Coates 's most popular works were Wisteria Cottage (1948)--a murder mystery--and The Outlaw Years (1930), a nonfiction book about the land pirates of the Natchez Trace between 1800 and 1835. His short stories, though superbly written and often anthologized in the 1940s, have not become standard fare. Still, despite the fact that he has not become as well known as some of his friends and contemporaries, such as Gertrude Stein and James Thurber, it is unfair and precipitous to pigeonhole him as a minor writer of the "lost generation." Generally his work has been undervalued, and in 1975 his novel Yesterday's Burdens (1933) was reprinted by Southern Illinois University Press as part of a series dedicated to reviving unrecognized masterworks.

Robert Myron Coates was born on 6 April 1897 in New Haven, Connecticut, to Frederick and Harriet Davidson Coates. His father was an itinerant machinist and tool designer, and Coates's loneliness as an...