Harvard University professor Robert Coles, the psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who championed the cause of children grappling with poverty and segregation, has died at 97, his son said Sunday.
The son, also named Robert Coles, told a news agency that his father died Thursday at a hospice centre in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
The elder Coles was famed for documenting the needs of children, particularly those caught in the crucible of social upheaval. The second and third parts of his five-volume Children of Crisis won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for general nonfiction.
“What enabled such children from such families to survive emotionally and educationally ordeals I feel sure many white middle-class boys and girls would find impossible?”
He would visit the same families repeatedly in order to get to know them well, and brought along crayons to allow the children he studied to draw pictures about their experiences and perceptions.
He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. He also was one of the first recipients of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. In 1999, a panel of judges ranked Children of Crisis as No. 44 on its list of the century’s 100 best English-language works of nonfiction.
The Children of Crisis books came out from 1967 to 1978. His first book focused on the effects of desegregation on children. The second looked at life among migrant workers, sharecroppers and others dwelling in mountain areas.
His other books included Their Eyes Meeting the World, exploring the meanings of children’s drawings; The Moral Life of Children, The Political Life of Children and The Spiritual Life of Children. He also wrote books on psychoanalyst Anna Freud and reformer Dorothy Day.
While many of his books probed conditions in the United States, he also studied children around the world. In all, he wrote more than 50 books and hundreds of articles and essays.
Some of his peers found his work to be more that of a reporter and advocate than that of a psychiatrist or scientist.
Born in Boston, Coles went on to graduate from Harvard in 1950. He received a medical degree from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1954. A 1972 magazine cover profile said he became interested in psychiatry as “the most philosophical of the disciplines” — and besides, he found he was unnerved when children cried when being vaccinated.
He acknowledged that he and his own family lived well, telling a newspaper in 1997, “It makes me uncomfortable, seeing the disparities between the world I document and the world I inhabit."
His wife died in 1993. They had three sons.
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