Home > Encyclopedia of Psychology > Robert Martin Coles

1929-
American psychiatrist and author.

Psychiatrist and author Robert Coles pioneered the use of oral history as a method of studying children. His

five-volume series of books called Children in Crisis, published from 1967-1978, won a Pulitzer Prize in recognition of its wide-ranging examination of children throughout the world and how they cope with war, poverty, and other crises. Trained as a pediatrician as well as a psychiatrist, Coles became a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard University Medical School in 1978. His lifelong interest in children has generated more than 50 books.

Coles was born in 1929 in Boston to parents who encouraged him to read what he has called "spiritually alert" novelists such as Tolstoy and George Eliot. His mother was a lifelong community worker; his father's values were exemplified in his work from the mid-1960s to the...