Conversations with Robert Coles

Robert Coles is a psychiatrist with a novelist’s sensibilities. “Of course everything I come up with” he says “novelists have known beforehand.”<P>These twenty-three interviews selected from hundreds that Coles has given disclose not only an illustrious physician trained in pediatrics and psychoanalysis but also a sage whose compassion for children and suffering seems boundless.<P>In focusing on a man known mainly as an eminent psychiatrist and author of <i>The Spiritual Life of Children</i> and more than fifty other books this collection is a departure from the other books in the Literary Conversations Series. By no means is Coles best known as a writer of belles lettres as are other figures in this series. Yet his varied critical insights and the critical authority with which he approaches literary subjects have enriched American literature.<P>Here through the prism of his medical and literary training Coles’s conversations reveal his imposing moral vision. As he ranges with pene