Following Strangers is the first critical biography of the exceptional novelist, short story writer and art critic Robert Myron Coates (1897-1973). During his lifetime, Coates was primarily known as the author of Wisteria Cottage (1948), a terrifying and widely-read novel about a psychopathological adolescent, and for his association with the urban magazine The New Yorker. Coates's most important contributions to American letters, however, are his first three novels, The Eater of Darkness (1926), Yesterday's Burdens (1933) and The Bitter Season (1946).

In these authentically Coatesian works, the writer comes acrossas an idiosyncratic experimentalist who touted literary innovation and made literary advances that would become fashionable only after several decades?especially the unusual combinations of literary genres and conventions; metafiction; confessionalism; and the disorienting mingling of fact and fiction of various sorts. More or less ignored by literary critics and literary historians alike, his highly innovative yet carefully composed works both deserve and demand scholarly attention in order to be fully appreciated. Next to providing critical analyses of his work, Following Strangers describes Coates's life and literary career against the cultural-historical background of his time.