Caro’s book on Robert Moses, a city planner who reshaped New York, is also a reflection on “the dangers of unchecked power,” and remains more resonant and relevant than ever.
When Robert Caro was writing “The Power Broker,” his 1974 biography of the urban planner Robert Moses, he often heard a deflating refrain.
“I must have heard a hundred times, nobody’s going to read a book about Robert Moses,” Caro said on a recent morning. “And I really did believe what people said, that nobody would read the book. I did believe that.
“Now they tell me it’s in its 74th printing,” he added brightly. “That’s a lot of books.”
Five decades after its publication, “The Power Broker” endures as a revered classic, prized as much for its elegant, novelistic prose as its blunt lessons on the uses and abuses of political power. The book that Caro feared might never be published went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, sell hundreds of thousands of copies and influence generations of journalists, historians and politicians.
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