Studying English at Harvard, the Boston-born Coles planned to become a teacher. He interviewed poet and physician William Carlos Williams for his senior honors thesis, and Williams persuaded him to go study medicine instead. He graduated the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1954, and did his residency at the University of Chicago, and then decided to complete psychiatric residencies at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. In 1958 he joined the U.S. Air Force as a psychiatrist, serving as the chief of neuropsychiatric services at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss.
Upon discharge in 1960, he returned to school to specialize in child psychiatry at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, married (Jane Hallowell was an English teacher), and moved to New Orleans. There, in November of that year, he happened to pass William Frantz Elementary School, where he witnessed a chaotic scene: 6-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted to school by U.S. Marshals after a federal judge ordered New Orleans schools to desegregate. Struck by her courageous determination, Dr. Coles volunteered to support and counsel Ruby and her family.
He documented his efforts in a series of articles for The Atlantic Monthly, reporting on Ruby and other Black children in the desegregation effort, who, along with white classmates and their families, were daily targets of racist protests, intimidation, and death threats. He gained this knowledge first hand, choosing to ride the bus to school with the kids for a year, as well as counsel the Bridges family in their home. Coles later compiled and expanded on those articles for his first book, Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear *. In 1963, Coles was recruited back to Harvard, eventually started teaching there, and became a professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities in 1977.
Meanwhile, he expanded his book about Ruby into a series of five volumes documenting how children and their parents deal with profound change, volumes 2 and 3 of which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1973. He later condensed that series again for a children’s book, The Story of Ruby Bridges. Coles was also awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 1981, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, and the National Humanities Medal in 2001. He described his literary method (in his book The Mind’s Fate) as an effort “to blend poetic insight with a craft and unite ultimately the rational and the intuitive, the aloof stance of the scholar with the passion and affection of the friend who cares and is moved.” Coles eventually wrote more than 80 books and 1,300 articles centering around human moral, spiritual, and social sensibility and reasoning, mainly in children but also in adults, and (especially) writers. Jane died from a brain tumor in 1993. Dr. Martin Robert Coles died in hospice in Lincoln, Mass., on June 4. He was 97.