[citation needed] In New Orleans, Coles witnessed 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, protected by U.S. Federal marshals, "walking through a screaming mob to integrate a public school.
In 1995 he returned to his original material and wrote The Story of Ruby Bridges, a popular children's book, published by Scholastic Corporation.
[citation needed] In addition to working with children in New Orleans and Atlanta, Coles wrote non-technical articles for a number of national publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Saturday Review, and The Times of London.
[citation needed] At the urging of Erik Erikson, in 1963 Coles became affiliated with the University Health Services at Harvard as a research psychiatrist.
He later co-founded the magazine DoubleTake, which documented the lives of ordinary people with photographs, articles, essays, poetry, and short stories.
Starting with the Children of Crisis series, Coles's approach to his subjects involves a difficult balancing act at the heart of the documentary enterprise.
Coles describes his own literary methods and goals 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."
[9] Coles authored more than eighty books and 1,300 articles, nearly all of them centrally concerned with human moral, spiritual, and social sensibility and reasoning, mainly in children but also in adults, writers especially,[10] including the novelist Walker Percy (who dedicated his final novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, to Coles), the poet William Carlos Williams, writer James Agee, novelist Flannery O'Connor, and others, such as Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, and Dorothea Lange.
[11] In 1960, Coles married Jane Erin Hallowell, a graduate of Radcliffe College and a high school teacher of English and history.