Robert Caro

As of the mid-2020s, Caro has published four volumes of his planned five-volume series on President Lyndon B. Johnson. The series began with The Path to Power in 1982, with the most recent installment, The Passage of Power, released in 2012. Readers and critics are eagerly awaiting the fifth and final book.

Before his LBJ series, Caro won the Pulitzer Prize for The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, published in 1974. The exhaustive, 1,300-page book details how Moses, an unelected official, acquired dictatorial control over New York's infrastructure. It is considered a masterclass in understanding how political power is actually wielded in modern America.

Caro is famous for his exhaustive, incredibly time-consuming research methodology, which involves reading millions of documents and conducting hundreds of interviews. To truly understand Lyndon Johnson, Caro even moved his family to the Texas Hill Country for three years to interview locals who knew the president. He famously drafts his work on old Smith-Corona typewriters to ensure his prose is as tight as his research.

Yes, Caro won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Master of the Senate, the third volume of his LBJ series, in 2003. He also won the National Book Award for The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power. His dedication to detail has earned him virtually every major American literary award.