Robert Coles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, "a child psychiatrist by training and a storyteller by inclination whose scores of books and articles transported readers into the minds of children, opening new vistas on issues as varied as race relations and moral reasoning," died June 4, the New York Times reported. He was 97.
A professor at Harvard University, Coles "eschewed ideologies and psychiatric orthodoxies, visiting the homes of children--first in the American South and then around the world--to listen intently to what they, their parents and others had to say. He returned again and again, sometimes for months or even years, building the trust that underpinned his work," the Times wrote.
His five-volume book series, Children of Crisis, was published between 1967 and 1977; Volumes 2 and 3 won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Although some criticized his approach as scattershot and unscientific, sociologist David Riesman observed in a 1972 interview with Time magazine that the effect of Cole's work was to obliterate stereotypes, to demonstrate that "policemen are not pigs, white Southerners are not rednecks, and Blacks are not all suffering in exotic misery.... What he is saying is 'People are more complicated, more varied, more interesting, have more resiliency and more survivability than you might think. I listen to them! You listen to them! Please listen! Again and again!' "
Coles offered proof "that hope is alive," Kenneth Clark, the psychologist whose insights contributed to the Supreme Court outlawing the racial segregation of schools in 1954, told the New York Times Magazine in 1978: "I don't know if he's one of the 10 just men required to keep this world spinning around.... You can't judge him by normal standards any more than you could Martin Luther King; they are men possessed."
Coles acknowledged a sense of "moral anxiety" as a white man writing about those with a less privileged existence, telling the Times in 1997: "I work with very vulnerable people, and yet I'm not very vulnerable myself. It makes me uncomfortable, seeing the disparities between the world I document and the world I inhabit."
He also wrote books about Bruce Springsteen and Walker Percy as well as novels, children's books, and poetry. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, and the National Humanities Medal in 2001.
His study of children began with Ruby Bridges, the first Black student at a New Orleans elementary school, "whose poise in the face of racism moved him deeply," the Times noted. She would be a central theme running through his career, inspiring him to write about children's moral and spiritual lives. They also collaborated on a children's book, The Story of Ruby Bridges, illustrated by George Ford (1995).
When Bridges grew up, she told Coles it was time for him to write Women of Crisis to accompany his earlier series. Coles and his wife, Jane Hallowell Coles, co-wrote the two-volume women's study, which was published in 1978 and 1980.