Lives We Carry with Us

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author profiles thirteen individuals he has known who have influenced him, from Ruby Bridges to Bruce Springsteen.

Lives We Carry with Us gathers together for the first time a diverse cross section of Coles’s profiles, originally published in our premier magazines over the span of five decades but never before collected in book form. Depicting the famous, the lesser known, and the unknown, the profiles here include portraits of James Agee, Dorothy Day, Erik Erikson, Dorothea Lange, Walker Percy, Bruce Springsteen, Simone Weil, and William Carlos Williams among others. Coles has chosen figures whom he considers his guardian spirits—individuals who shaped, challenged, and inspired one of the great moral voices of our era.

Also featured are Anna Freud, Flannery O’Connor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Una Anciana.