Harvard University professor Robert Coles, the psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who championed the cause of children grappling with poverty and segregation, has died at 97, his son said Sunday.The son, also named Robert Coles, told The Associated Press that his father died Thursday at a hospice center in Lincoln, Massachusetts.The elder Coles was famed for documenting the needs of children, particularly those caught in the crucible of social upheaval. The second and third parts of his five-volume “Children of Crisis” won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for general nonfiction.In a 1965 Washington Post essay, he wrote that, expecting to find many psychiatric problems among the children of poverty, that instead “I was constantly surprised at the endurance shown by children we would all call poor or, in the current fashion, ‘culturally disadvantaged.’”
“What enabled such children from such families to survive emotionally and educationally ordeals I feel sure many white middle-class boys and girls would find impossible?”He would visit the same families repeatedly in order to get to know them well, and brought along crayons to allow the children he studied to draw pictures about their experiences and perceptions.
