Restrictions to Access

RESTRICTED: Series 1, 4, 5, and 6 and additions may be used only with the permission of Robert Coles.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Robert Coles Papers #4333, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Received from Robert Coles, Cambridge, Mass., in October 1982, October 1987, May 1989, and July 1991, with numerous additions after 1992; and from Chris Sims in June 1999.

Additional Descriptive Resources

A finding aid compiled between 1982 and 1996 is available upon request at the repository.

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• American literature--20th century.
• Berrigan, Daniel.
• Campbell, Will D.
• Child psychiatry--United States--History--20th century.
• Coles, Robert.
• College teachers--Massachusetts--History--20th century.
• Harvard University--Faculty--History--20th century.
• Lifton, Robert Jay, 1926-
• McCarthy, Corman, 1933-
• Mondale, Walter F., 1928-
• Psychiatrists--Massachusetts--History--20th century.
• Warren, Robert Penn, 1905-
• Woodward, C. Vann (Comer Vann), 1908-

• Southern Oral History Program Papers (#4007), Interview with Robert Coles (B-2).

Time magazine has called Robert Coles "the most influential living psychiatrist in the U.S." Though best known for his work on children, he is also a leading authority on poverty and racial discrimination in the country. He first won recognition for his studies of black children in the South. From these, he has gone on to observe and write about children of other minorities (Native Americans, Inuit, and Chicanos) and in other stressful or disadvantaged situations (migrant camps, ghettos, Appalachia, and Northern Ireland.) Through his writings and testimony before congressional committees, he has sought reform in the areas of race relations, mining conditions, pesticides, health services, and, particularly, hunger and malnutrition. Coles has also written widely on contemporary literature, religion, psychology, and other dimensions of American culture.

Coles was born October 12, 1929, in Boston. He earned his B.A. from Harvard in 1950 and his M.D. from Columbia in 1954, after which he decided to become a child psychiatrist and continued his training through into the Air Force and served as chief of neuropsychiatric services at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi.

At the end of his tour of duty in 1960, Coles became a member of the Psychiatric Staff of Harvard's Medical School (1960-1962) and Health Services (1963-). He and his wife, however, lived in Vining, Georgia, near Atlanta, for the first half of the 1960s, where he studied black children and how they were affected by school desegregation and the civil rights movement. He himself was actively involved in civil rights work during those years, particularly through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he served as psychiatric counselor. In 1966, he returned to Harvard as a lecturer in general education. In 1978, he became professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School.

A year after his return to Harvard, Coles published his first book, Children of Crisis: A Study in Courage and Fear, based on his work in the South. This was the first of a five-volume series, volumes two and three of which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Coles has written over thirty-five books (as of 1983) and over 500 articles, which have been published in more than sixty magazines, journals, and newspapers. He is a regular contributor to Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker , New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Boston Globe , and several psychiatric journals. Since 1966, he has been a contributing editor to the New Republic, and has served on the editorial boards of American Scholar and several other journals.

In 1960, Coles married Jane Hallowell of Boston. They co-authored the two-volume Women of Crisis and several other works. They live in Concord, Mass., and are the parents of three sons.

The collection consists primarily of child psychiatrist, social activist, and author Robert Coles's correspondence and writings from the mid-1960s onwards, with a few articles from earlier years. Correspondence is with psychiatric and journalistic colleagues, students, editors and publishers, readers, friends, and others, including Daniel Berrigan, Robert Jay Lifton, Will Campbell, Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, Cormac McCarthy, and Walter Mondale. Writings include drafts of most of Coles's books, and drafts and published versions of most of his articles. Other writings include speeches, interviews, and congressional testimony by Coles, writings by others about Coles, and miscellaneous subject files relating to Coles's teaching and public appearances. The collection also includes drawings by children that were included in an exhibit titled "Their Eyes Meeting the World: The Drawings and Painting of Children," as well as other exhibit materials.

Additions to the collection have not been incorporated into the original arrangement.