Fall 1998
Articles
Reviews
1998 Award Recipients
1997 Award Recipients
Special Presentation
|
Biographical Sketch of Robert Coles
Dale Richmond Award Winner
by William Coleman, M.D. FAAP, Chapel
Hill, NC
Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist who has spent his working life
trying to understand the lives of children from a variety of backgrounds. The result of
that effort has been a series of books that tell of the particular lives of boys and girls
who live in different regions of the United States, and in foreign countries.
Dr. Coles is a research psychiatrist for the Harvard University Health Services, and a
Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at the Harvard Medical School. He is also
the James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University. He has offered courses at
Harvard College, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School, the
Harvard School of Education, and Harvard Extension School. He has been a visiting
professor at Duke University in the History department for many years, is a founding
member of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and is a co-editor of Double
Take Magazine published at the Center. Dr. Coles received his A.B. from Harvard
and his M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Since 1961, Dr. Coles has published more than 1,300 articles, reviews, and essays in
newspapers, magazines, journals, and anthologies. His 60 books include: Children of
Crisis (in five volumes); Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work; The Middle
Americans; Walker Percy: An American Search; The Old Ones of New Mexico; Flannery
O’Connor’s South; Women of Crisis (with Jane Coles, in two volumes); The
Moral Life of Children; The Political Life of Children; Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion;
Times of Surrender; Harvard Diary (Volumes I & II); The Call of Stories: Teaching and
the Moral Imagination; The Call of Service: A witness to Idealism and Doing
Documentary Work.
Dr. Coles examined how children from a variety of backgrounds acquire religious values
in various social and cultural settings and how these values connect with a given
child’s life in The Spiritual Life of Children. Recent titles include a book
entitled Their Eyes Meeting the World (on the meaning of children’s drawings
and paintings); The Youngest Parents; and The Moral Intelligence of Children.
Dr. Coles has received numerous awards, including: the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize of
Phi Beta Kappa (1967); the Anisfield-Wolf Award in Race Relations of the Saturday Review
(1968); the Hofheimer Award of the American Psychiatric Association (1968); the McAlpin
Medal of the National Association of Mental Health (1972); Weatherford Prize of Berea
College and the Council of Southern Mountains (1973); Lillian Smith Award of the Southern
Regional Council (1973); the Pulitzer Prize (1973); a John D. And Catharine MacArthur
Foundation Fellowship award (1981).
Dr. Coles lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Two sons, Robert and Daniel, are
physicians. A third son, Michael, is in medical school.
|
