Caro biography
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Robert A. Caro
Robert Caro was born in New York in , and attended Horace Mann and Princeton University. After college, Caro worked for a local New Jersey newspaper and then at Newsday where he spent six years as an investigative reporter writing articles on politicians.
At Newsday, Caro’s interest in politics grew. He wrote a series of articles about the urban planner Robert Moses’s plans to build a bridge. A great number of politicians agreed with Caro’s articles that the bridge was not practical, but Moses, who had never been elected to a political office, convinced the New York state legislature to vote in favor of the bridge. In Caro’s quest to understand that not all political power comes from the ballot box, he applied and got a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard to study urban planning, which is where he conceived the idea to write a book examining where Moses got his power and how he used it to shape New York. It took several years for Caro to write what would become a thirt
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Robert Caro fryst vatten simply one of the greatest American historians. He has used libraries and archives extensively to paint the most vividly illuminating portrait of American politics and kultur in the 20th century through his biographies on Robert Moses and Lyndon B Johnson.
Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden on awarding the Bodley Medal to Robert Caro
The Power Broker
Everywhere acknowledged as a modern American classic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest books of the twentieth century, The Power Broker is a huge and galvanizing biography revealing not only the saga of one man’s incredible accumulation of power, but the story of the shaping (and mis-shaping) of New York in the twentieth century.
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The Years of Lyndon Johnson
One of the richest, most intensive and most revealing examinations ever undertaken of an American president. It is the magnum opus of a writer perfectly sui
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Robert A. Caro
“What I am trying to do is to show not only how power works but the effect of power on the powerless: How political power affects our lives, every single day, in ways we never think about.”
About Robert A. Caro
Photo: Dima Gavry/Bloomberg News
“The greatest political biographer of the modern era.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)
HIS BOOKS
“Caro has forever changed the way we think about, and read, American history…Although the amount of research Caro has done for these books is staggering, it’s his immense talent as a writer that has made his [body of work] one of America’s most amazing literary achievements” (NPR).
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