Coles, Robert.

Time magazine has called Robert Coles the most influential living psychiatrist in the U.S. Though best known for his work on children, he is also a leading authority on poverty and racial discrimination in the country. He first won recognition for his studies of black children in the South. From these, he has gone on to observe and write about children of other minorities (Native Americans, Inuit, and Chicanos) and in other stressful or disadvantaged situations (migrant camps, ghettos, Appalachia, and Northern Ireland.) Through his writings and testimony before congressional committees, he has sought reform in the areas of race relations, mining conditions, pesticides, health services, and, particularly, hunger and malnutrition. Coles has also written widely on contemporary literature, religion, psychology, and other dimensions of American culture.

Coles was born October 12, 1929, in Boston. He earned his B.A. from Harvard in 1950 and his M.D. from Columbia in 1954, after which he decided to become a child psychiatrist and continued his training through into the Air Force and served as chief of neuropsychiatric services at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi.

At the end of his tour of duty in 1960, Coles became a member of the Psychiatric Staff of Harvard's Medical School (1960-1962) and Health Services (1963-). He and his wife, however, lived in Vining, Georgia, near Atlanta, for the first half of the 1960s, where he studied black children and how they were affected by school desegregation and the civil rights movement. He himself was actively involved in civil rights work during those years, particularly through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he served as psychiatric counselor. In 1966, he returned to Harvard as a lecturer in general education. In 1978, he became professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School.

A year after his return to Harvard, Coles published his first book, Children of Crisis: A Study in Courage and Fear, based on his work in the South. This was the first of a five-volume series, volumes two and three of which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Coles has written over thirty-five books (as of 1983) and over 500 articles, which have been published in more than sixty magazines, journals, and newspapers. He is a regular contributor to Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Boston Globe, and several psychiatric journals. Since 1966, he has been a contributing editor to the New Republic, and has served on the editorial boards of American Scholar and several other journals.

In 1960, Coles married Jane Hallowell of Boston. They co-authored the two-volume Women of Crisis and several other works. They live in Concord, Mass., and are the parents of three sons.

From the guide to the Robert Coles Papers, 1954-1999, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. Southern Historical Collection.)