Martin Robert Coles (October 12, 1928 – June 4, 2026) was an American author, child psychiatrist and academic who was a professor at Harvard University.
Contents
Biography
Early life and education
Martin Robert Coles was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 12, 1928, to Philip Coles, an immigrant from Leeds, England, United Kingdom, and Sandra Young Coles, originally from Sioux City, Iowa. He had a Jewish and Catholic heritage on his father's side, and an Episcopalian background on his mother's side. Robert attended Boston Latin School, where he played tennis, ran track and edited the school literary magazine. In 1946, he entered Harvard College, where he studied English literature and helped to edit the undergraduate literary magazine, The Harvard Advocate. He graduated magna cum laude and earned Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1950.
Coles originally intended to become a teacher or professor but as part of his senior 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 Pritzker School of Medicine, Coles moved on to psychiatric residencies at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Knowing that he was to be called into the U.S. Armed Forces under the Doctor 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 sub-specialize in child psychiatry. He served as chief of neuropsychiatric services at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, and was honorably discharged in 1960. He returned to Boston and finished his child psychiatry training at the Children's Hospital. In July 1960, he was married to Jane Hollowell, and the couple moved to New Orleans.
Career
In New Orleans In 1960, Coles witnessed six-year-old Ruby Bridges, protected by U.S. Federal marshals, "walking through a screaming mob to integrate a public school", in the words of the New York Times. He volunteered to support and counsel Ruby and her family during this difficult period. Coles wrote a series of articles for The Atlantic Monthly on Ruby and other black children, who, along with their white classmates and their families, were targets of daily public protests, intimidation, and even death threats during the desegregation of public schools in New Orleans.
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.
In addition to working with children in New Orleans and Atlanta, Coles wrote non-technical articles for a number of national publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Saturday Review, and The Times of London. By 1969, Coles wrote in-depth profiles for The New Yorker and contributed regular columns to The New Republic, New Oxford Review, America, and the American Poetry Review.
At the urging of Erik Erikson, in 1963 Coles became affiliated with the University Health Services at Harvard as a research psychiatrist. Gradually, he began teaching in the Harvard Medical School, eventually becoming Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities in 1977. He taught courses in various schools across Harvard University, including the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Business School, the Law School, the Extension School and the School of Education, where in 1995 he was given a newly established position as James Agee Professor of Social Ethics. He came to teach courses not only in the moral, spiritual, and social sensibilities of children but also in those phenomena generally, especially as expressed in stories, both literary fictions and oral narratives, and as affected by conditions of poverty and social injustice. As a longtime professor, Coles has influenced generations of Harvard undergraduates and graduate students. In 2007, Harvard University named an annual Call of Service lecture in honor of Coles.
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 Nonfiction 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. He later co-founded the magazine DoubleTake, which documented the lives of ordinary people with photographs, articles, essays, poetry, and short stories. The magazine won several awards, including the 1998 National Magazine Award for Editorial Excellence in the category of General Excellence.
Death
He died in Lincoln, Massachusetts, on June 4, 2026, at the age of 97.
Personal life
In 1960, Coles married Jane Erin Hallowell, a graduate of Radcliffe College and a high-school teacher of English and history. They had three sons. Coles and his wife co-authored the 1978 book Women of Crisis: Lives of struggle and hope. She died of a brain tumor in 1993.
Coles was a practicing Catholic.
Legacy
Coles's personal and professional papers are archived at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and at Michigan State University.
Honors
Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, 1973
Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1998
National Humanities Medal, 2001