Robert A. Caro Quote
Neither, it turned out, was politics. His views on government were strong, if a trifle simplistic. The cause of the Depression, he felt, was Al Capone. The trouble with the nation’s economy, he declared, was simply Prohibition, which makes it possible for large-scale dealers in illicit liquor to amass tremendous amounts of currency; the present economic crisis, he explained, was due to the withdrawal of billions of dollars from the channels of legitimate trade by these bootleggers.
Robert A. Caro
Neither, it turned out, was politics. His views on government were strong, if a trifle simplistic. The cause of the Depression, he felt, was Al Capone. The trouble with the nation’s economy, he declared, was simply Prohibition, which makes it possible for large-scale dealers in illicit liquor to amass tremendous amounts of currency; the present economic crisis, he explained, was due to the withdrawal of billions of dollars from the channels of legitimate trade by these bootleggers.
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About Robert A. Caro
After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote The Power Broker (1974), a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, which was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. He has since written four of a planned five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982, 1990, 2002, 2012), a biography of the former president. Caro has been described as "the most influential biographer of the last century".
For his biographies, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography, two National Book Awards (including one for Lifetime Achievement), the Francis Parkman Prize, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, the Mencken Award for Best Book, the Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, the D. B. Hardeman Prize, and a Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010 President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal.
Due to Caro's reputation for exhaustive research and detail, he is sometimes invoked by reviewers of other writers who are called "Caro-esque" for their own extensive research.