Robert A. Caro

Born and raised in New York City, Robert Caro graduated from Princeton University, was later a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and worked for six years as an investigative reporter for Newsday. 

 

To create his first book, The Power Broker, Caro spent seven years tracing and talking with hundreds of men and women who worked with, for or against Robert Moses, and examining mountains of files never open to the public. The Power Broker, everywhere acclaimed as a modern classic, was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. 

 

To research The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Caro and his wife, Ina, moved from his native New York City to Texas, to live in the locales in which Johnson grew up and to immerse himself in Johnson’s world. He has spent years examining documents at the Johnson Library in Austin. And he has interviewed thousands of persons connected with Johnson’s life, many of whom had never before been interviewed.  

The Years of Lyndon Johnson is, according to The London Times, “one of the truly great political biographies of the modern era. A masterpiece.”

 

For his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, twice won the National Book Award, three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has also won virtually every other major literary honor, including the National Humanities Medal, 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 “exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist.”

 

In his newest book, Working, Caro gives us an unprecedented glimpse into his own life and work, in evocatively written, personal pieces.

 

Caro lives with his wife, the writer Ina Caro, in New York City, where he is at work on the fifth and final volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.