“I am trying to make clear through my writing
something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be
literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.”
– Robert Caro
Caro, born
on this date in 1935, is best known for his celebrated biographies of United
States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. In a few days (Nov. 6th) he will
receive the National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement.
A native of New York City, Caro started in
journalism while studying at Princeton University. He
began his professional career as a
reporter with the New Brunswick (N.J.)
Daily Home News, and from there he went on to six years as an
investigative reporter with the Long Island newspaper Newsday.
After working for many years as a reporter, Caro
came in contact with urban planner
Moses and the influence he had on numerous projects in New York City and the
state of New York. Fascinated by Moses’
power, he wrote The Power Broker in 1974.
The book not only rose to the top of
most best-seller lists, but also was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the
hundred greatest nonfiction books of the 20th Century. He has since written four of a planned five
volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982, 1990, 2002, 2012), a
biography of the former president. For
his biographies, he has won almost every possible literary award including two
Pulitzer Prizes in Biography and the National Book Award for The Power Broker.
While the
Johnson books have received numerous 
accolades too, it is The Power Broker
that is widely viewed as a seminal work because it combined painstaking
historical research with a smoothly flowing narrative writing style.
Lauded for his exploration of how power both
shapes lives and shapes decisions, he noted, “I never wanted to do
biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to
examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives.”
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