The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

The Power Broker is widely regarded as the greatest biography written by an American and one of the finest works of non-fiction of the twentieth century. Robert Caro's exhaustive study of Robert Moses, the unelected “master builder” who reshaped New York City and State across four decades, is at heart an investigation into how political power is actually accumulated and wielded in a democracy. It fills a gap the collection is thin on: the biography as literature, in the tradition of Plutarch and Boswell, carried to modern scale.

Robert Caro spent seven years researching and writing The Power Broker, conducting more than five hundred interviews and nearly going bankrupt in the process. Published in 1974 at over 1,300 pages, already cut by roughly a third from the manuscript, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography the following year. Its portrait of Robert Moses, who built the parkways, bridges, parks, and public housing of modern New York while never holding elected office, permanently changed how Americans understand urban power, and launched Caro on the multi-decade life of Lyndon Johnson that has occupied the rest of his career.