Robert Caro

Robert Caro is an American author and biographer widely considered the greatest living practitioner of biographical nonfiction in the English language. Born in New York City in 1935, Caro studied at Princeton University and worked as a journalist and investigative reporter before devoting his career to two monumental, multi-volume biographical projects: a life of urban planner Robert Moses and a life of Lyndon Johnson. His biography The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974) won the Pulitzer Prize and is considered one of the greatest works of American nonfiction ever published—a 1,300-page account of power, ambition, and the making of modern New York. The Years of Lyndon Johnson series, begun with The Path to Power (1982), now runs to four volumes with a fifth in progress: it is widely regarded as the most exhaustively researched and brilliantly written political biography in American history. Caro received the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2016, the Pulitzer Prize twice, the National Book Award, and the National Humanities Medal. At an age when most writers have long since retired, Caro continues to work on the final volume of his Johnson biography, which many in the literary world await as one of the most anticipated books in decades.