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Unlike those modern writers who attempt to present a picture of reality undistorted by the lens of a personal style, Author Coates gives the picture in his own style. His reality is consequently very personal and to that extent limited. It is a respectably authentic picture of life he shows, but a very literary life. Yesterday's Burdens is a tour de force, a literarization of the dust and heat of our day.
The Author has already made a small but solid place for himself among U. S. writers. Yaleman (1919) who escaped the "Yale literary renaissance" but not the War, he joined the U. S. literary colony in Paris after the Armistice, stuck it out for five years. In Paris he knew "everybody," contributed to such magazines as Broom, transition, Gargoyle, wrote a Dada novel, The Eater of Darkness. Friend of Gertrude Stein's (who described him as "the one young man who has an individual rhythm, his words made a sound to the eyes, most people's do not") he introduced Ernest Hemingway to her. Back in the U. S., he wrote for the New Yorker, until last year was its book reviewer. Meantime he had married Sculptress Elsa Kirpal, written a best-seller (The Outlaw Years), and begun to build with his own hands his own house near Brewster. N. Y. Tall, redhaired, slow moving, he likes to read dictionaries and trade journals, spends whole afternoons throwing an ice-pick at a target on a barn door.