For his biographies
of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro has twice won the
Pulitzer Prize for Biography, twice won the National Book Critics Circle
Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, and has also won virtually
every other major literary honor, including the National Book Award, the
Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters,
and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American
Historians to the book that best “exemplifies the union of the historian
and the artist.” In 2010, he received the National Humanities Medal from
President Obama.
To create his first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of
New York, Caro spent seven years tracing and talking with hundreds of
men and women who worked with, for, or against Robert Moses, including a
score of his top aides. He examined mountains of files never opened to
the public. Everywhere acclaimed as a modern classic, The Power Broker
was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest
nonfiction books of the twentieth century. It is, according to David
Halberstam, “Surely the greatest book ever written about a city.” And
The New York Times Book Review said: “In the future, the scholar who
writes the history of American cities in the twentieth century will
doubtless begin with this extraordinary effort.”
To
research The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Caro and his wife, Ina, moved from
his native New York City to the Texas Hill Country and then to
Washington, D.C., to live in the locales in which Johnson grew up and in
which he built, while still young, his first political machine. He has
spent years examining documents at the Johnson Library in Austin and
interviewing men and women connected with Johnson’s life, many of whom
had never before been interviewed. The first volume of The Years of
Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, was cited by The Washington Post as
“proof that we live in a great age of biography . . . [a book] of
radiant excellence . . . Caro’s evocation of the Texas Hill Country, his
elaboration of Johnson’s unsleeping ambition, his understanding of how
politics actually work, are–let it be said flat out–at the summit of
American historical writing.” Professor Henry F. Graff of Columbia
University called the second volume, Means of Ascent, “brilliant. No
review does justice to the drama of the story Caro is telling, which is
nothing less than how present-day politics was born.” And the London
Times hailed volume three, Master of the Senate, as “a masterpiece . . .
Robert Caro has written one of the truly great political biographies of
the modern age.”
“Caro has a unique place among American political biographers,”
according to The Boston Globe. “He has become, in many ways, the
standard by which his fellows are measured.” And Nicholas von Hoffman
wrote: “Caro has changed the art of political biography.”
Caro graduated from Princeton University and later became a Nieman
Fellow at Harvard University. He lives in New York City with his wife,
Ina, an historian and writer.
