Robert A. Caro

  • 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.

    Caro’s first book, 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.  It is, according to David Halberstam, “Surely the greatest book ever written about a city.”  And the London Times hailed The Years of Lyndon Johnson (The Path to Power, Means of Ascent, 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.”

    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.