Yesterday's Burdens

A memorable period piece, remarkable for its vivid language and thematic structure, Yesterday’s Burdens is an obsessive Story of New York life in the 1930s.   Malcolm Cowley, a close personal friend of Robert Coates, has pointed out in his Afterword to this new edition the aptness of this novel to its time. Yesterday’s Bur­dens is an informal story of an unconven­tional young man of the 1930s. The cen­tral character, Henderson, typifies the successful young New Yorker, whose life style reflects the restless, seeking, discon­tented mood of his time. With him, the reader crisscrosses Manhattan, visits speak­easies, crashes parties, and participates in Henderson’s sexual activities and his pos­sible suicide (the novel has three end­ings).   Frankly experimental in technique, the novel attempts the universal in its ap­peal. Readers today no doubt will appre­ciate the unexpected tenderness and pas­sion with which the author endows his very ordinary characters.