Coates, Robert M. (Robert Myron), 1897-1973

American writer and art critic.

American novelist.

Robert M. Coates was a writer and art critic. He was associated with the "New Yorker" from 1927 until his death in 1973 and was its art critic from 1937-1967. He contributed short stories and articles to numerous magazines and wrote several novels.

Robert M. Coates was an accomplished American author, noted for his short fiction. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, he travelled throughout his youth with itinerant parents, and was educated at Yale. He tried to write for a living, and ended up in France with the Lost Generation, where he came under the influence of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and the Dada movement. He returned to New York, and worked steadily for New Yorker as an art reviewer and story writer. He went on to write several novels and numerous short stories, which were admired by critics and colleagues, but never achieved the mainstream popularity their quality deserved.

American author Robert M. [Myron] Coates (1897-1973), who coined the term, "Abstract Expressionism," was art critic for The New Yorker . Coates works included: All the Year Round: a Book of Stories [1943]; The Bitter Season [1946]; and Wisteria Cottage [1948].

Henry Pettit was Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was named Honorary Curator of Rare Books in Norlin Library in the early 1950's, managing the collections and encouraging the acquisition of such materials as eighteenth-century English literature and examples of early printing. Pettit was a scholar of the English poet Edward Young (1683-1765), compiling A Bibliography of Young's Night Thoughts (1954) and editing The Correspondence of Edward Young (1971).