Robert Coles

Born Martin Robert Coles in Boston, Massachusetts on October 12, 1929. He entered Harvard College in 1946, where he studied English literature and helped to edit the undergraduate literary magazine, The Advocate. He graduated magna cum laude and earned Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1950. He originally intended to become a teacher or professor, but as part of his honors thesis, he interviewed the poet and physician William Carlos Williams, who promptly persuaded him to go into medicine. He studied medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, graduating in 1954. After residency training at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois (the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine), Coles moved on to psychiatric residencies at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts (the two hospitals are affiliates of Harvard University and the Harvard University Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts). Knowing that he was to be called into the U.S. Armed Forces under the "doctors' draft," Coles joined the Air Force in 1958 and was assigned the rank of Captain. His field of specialization was psychiatry, his intention eventually to subspecialize in child psychiatry. He served as chief of neuropsychiatric services at Keesler Air Force base in Biloxi, Mississippi, and made frequent trips into New Orleans. During these trips he witnessed scenes of racial conflict, many of them related to the desegregation of the public schools. He wrote a series of articles for The Atlantic Monthly, profiling Ruby Bridges, one of the first Black children to desegregate a public elementary school in New Orleans and therefore a target of daily public protests, intimidation, and even death threats. As a child psychiatrist, he had volunteered to support and counsel Ruby and her family during this difficult period. These articles led to his first book, Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear, and ultimately to his decision to develop that book into a series of books documenting how children and their parents deal with profound change, a series that won him the Pulitzer prize in 1973. In 1995 he returned to his original material and wrote The Story of Ruby Bridges, a popular children's book, published by Scholastic Corporation. Upon his honorable discharge from the Air Force, Coles returned briefly to Boston. On July 4, 1960, he married Jane Hallowell, a graduate of Radcliffe College and a high school teacher of English and history. After finishing his child psychiatry training at the Children's Hospital, the Coleses returned to the South, living in New Orleans. In 1963 Coles became affiliated with University Health Services at Harvard as a research psychiatrist, and gradually he began teaching in the Harvard Medical School, eventually becoming Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities in 1977. His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971, a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1973 for his series of books Children of Crisis, a MacArthur Award in 1981, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, and the National Humanities Medal in 2001.