Robert Coles

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Robert Coles (b. October 12, 1929) is an American author, developmental psychologist, and professor at Harvard University. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, he attended Harvard, where he originally pursued literary interests until persuaded to go into medicine. He became a medical doctor in 1954 and moved to the South with plans to start a quiet practice as a child psychologist. Scenes of racial conflict he witnessed there led him to dedicate his efforts to documenting how children and their parents deal with profound change. His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1973 for his series of books Children of Crisis. He later co-founded the magazine DoubleTake, a high-quality magazine which documented the lives of ordinary people with photographs and articles. Coles has written over fifty books and writes regular columns for The New Republic, New Oxford Review, and American Poetry Review.

[edit] Published works

A Study in Courage and Fear, Volume 1 of Children of Crisis (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1967)
Dead End School, with illustrations by Norman Rockwell (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968)
The Image Is You, children's photos organized by Donald Erceg with text by Coles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969)
Still Hungry in America, with photos by Al Clayton (New York: World Publishing Company, 1969)
Erik H. Erikson: the Growth of His Work (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970)
Uprooted Children: The Early Life of Migrant Farm Workers (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970) ISBN 0-8229-3192-3
Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers, Volume 2 of Children of Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971)
The South Goes North, Volume 3 of Children of Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971)
The Middle Americans; Proud and Uncertain, with photos by Jon Erikson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971)
Farewell to the South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972) ISBN 0-316-15158-0
The Buses Roll, with photos by Carol Baldwin and Peter T. Whitney (New York: Norton, 1974) ISBN 0-393-05529-9
William Carlos Williams: The knack of survival in America (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1975) ISBN 0-8135-0800-2
Eskimos, Indians, Chicanos, Volume 4 of Children of Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977) ISBN 0-316-15162-9
The Privileged Ones: The Well-off and the Rich in America, Volume 5 of Children of Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977) ISBN 0-316-15149-1
A Festering Sweetness: Poems of American People (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsbrugh Press, 1978) ISBN 0-8229-5290-4
The Last and First Eskimos, with photos by Alex Harris (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1978) ISBN 0-8212-0737-7
Women of Crisis: Lives of struggle and hope, with Jane Hallowell Coles (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978) ISBN 0-440-09536-0
Flannery O'Connor's South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980) ISBN 0-8071-0655-0
I Will Always Stay Me: Writings of Migrant Children, edited by Sherry Kafka and Robert Coles (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1982) ISBN 0-932012-27-2
Photographs of a Lifetime, photos by Dorothea Lange with an essay by Coles (Millerton, New York: Aperture, 1982) ISBN 0-89381-100-9
The Moral Life of Children (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986) ISBN 0-87113-034-3
The Political Life of Children (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986)
Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1987) ISBN 0-201-02829-8
Simone Weil; A Modern Pilgrimage (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1987) ISBN 0-201-02205-2
Harvard Diary: Reflections of the Sacred and the Secular (New York: Crossroad, 1988)
Times of Surrender: Selected Essays (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988) ISBN 0-87745-188-5
The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989) ISBN 0-395-42935-8
Rumors of Separate Worlds: Poems (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989) ISBN 0-87745-258-X
The Spiritual Life of Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990) ISBN 0-395-55999-5
Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1992) ISBN 0-201-57707-0
Their Eyes Meeting the World: The Drawings and Paintings of Children, edited by Margaret Sartor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992) ISBN 0-395-61129-6
The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993) ISBN 0-395-71084-7
The Story of Ruby Bridges, illustrated by George Ford (New York: Scholastic, 1995) ISBN 0-590-43967-7
Doing Documentary Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) ISBN 0-19-511629-1
The Moral Intelligence of Children (New York: Random House, 1997) ISBN 0-679-44811-X
Old and On Their Own, with photos by Alex Harris and Thomas Roma (New York: Center for Documentary Studies/Norton, 1997) ISBN 0-393-04606-0
The Youngest Parents: Teenage pregnancy as it shapes lives, with Robert E. Coles, Daniel A. Coles, Michael H. Coles, and photos by Jocelyn Lee and John Moses (New York: Center for Documentary Studies, 1997) ISBN 0-393-04082-8
The Secular Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) ISBN 0-691-05805-9
The Erik Erikson Reader, selected and edited by Coles (New York: Norton, 2000) ISBN 0-393-04845-4
Lives of Moral Leadership (New York: Random House, 2000) ISBN 0-375-50108-8
Growing Up Poor: A Literary Anthology, edited by Robert Coles, Randy Testa, and Michael Coles (New York: New Press, 2001) ISBN 1-56584-623-0
A Life in Medicine: A Literary Anthology, edited by Coles and Randy Testa (New York: New Press, 2002) ISBN 1-56584-729-6
When They Were Young: A photographic restrospective of childhood from the Library of Congress (Carlsbad, California: Kales Press/Library of Congress, 2002) ISBN 0-9670076-5-8
Bruce Springsteen's America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing (New York: Random House, 2003) ISBN 0-375-50559-8
Teaching Stories: An Anthology on the Power of Learning and Literature, selected by Coles (New York: Modern Library, 2004) ISBN 0-8129-7169-8

[edit] Further reading

Ronda, Bruce A. Intellect and Spirit: The Life and Work of Robert Coles. New York: Continuum, 1989.
Woodruff, Jay, and Sarah Carew (eds.). Conversations with Robert Coles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992.

[edit] References

Keillor, Garrison. The Writer's Almanac. October 12, 2006.
London, Scott. "A Way of Seeing: The Work of Robert Coles". Scott London. (Retrieved October 19, 2006).