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.”
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.