CURRENT BIOGRAPHY YEARBOOK --1984--
See Current Biography Yearbook 1984 for entire article
As a muckraking reporter for Newsday, the Long Island, New York daily, in the early 1960s, Robert A. Caro became "interested in how power works." Out of that interest have come two panoramic
political sagas, each seven years in the writing and both bestsellers. The first was The
Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974), a biography of the unelected "master builder" who made himself the most powerful figure in the City and State of
New York in our time. That work won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize for the book "Which best represents the union of the historian and the artist." The second was The Path
to Power (1982), the first volume in a projected trilogy about the thirty-sixth president of the United States,
The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Richard Eder saw in The
Path to Power "Gibbon-like dimensions, Gibbon-like thoroughness too, and Gibbon-like
passion ...the base of a monument." The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award as the best nonfiction
work of 1982.