Robert A. Caro's The Power Broker at Fifty
The Mathew "Mike" Gladstein Lecture in Biography
- Monday, October 7, 2024
- Sold Out
- Livestream tickets available: $30 (Members $20)
Event Details:
In-person tickets are sold out, but livestream tickets are still available.
In 1974, Alfred A. Knopf published Robert A. Caro's monumental book on Robert Moses, The Power Broker. Fifty years later, the book has become iconic—it is America's most widely read study of power. What explains the enduring appeal of this work? What are its unique attributes? Did Caro, an author who has won every major literary award for his books on Moses and Lyndon Baines Johnson, envision this kind of success at the outset?
Last November, podcast hosts Roman Mars (99% Invisible) and Elliott Kalan (The Flop House, The Daily Show) set out to explore these and other questions in a special year-long book club devoted to Caro's 1200-page masterwork. This fall, the New-York Historical Society is pleased to welcome Mars and Kalan to our stage to sit down with Caro and talk about his experience researching and writing the book, the unique publishing journey of The Power Broker, the audience it has commanded among leaders and politicians, and what it's like to see new generations of readers coming to it.
Robert A. Caro, regarded as one of the nation’s most celebrated historians and biographers, has dedicated his career to examining political power: how it really works, not in theory but in practice; and how it affects those who don’t have power—the powerless. He has done it through chronicling the lives of two transformative figures of the 20th century: Robert Moses and President Lyndon B. Johnson. For his biographies of Moses and Johnson, Robert A. Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, twice won the National Book Award, three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has also won virtually every other major literary honor, including the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best “exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist.” In 2010 President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal. In 2019, he published a memoir, Working. Caro graduated from Princeton, was later a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and worked for six years as an investigative reporter for Newsday. He lives with his wife, the author Ina Caro, in New York City, where he is at work on the fifth and final volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
Elliott Kalan (moderator) is a podcast host, comedian, and former head writer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Roman Mars (moderator) is the host of the radio show and podcast 99% Invisible, as well as a contributor to the broadcasts Radiolab and Planet Money, and the author of The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design.
Presented in partnership with 99% Invisible
Location:
The Robert H. Smith Auditorium at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024
Livestreaming:
Join us via livestream! Livestream Access: $30 (Members $20)
We will contact all registered attendees with instructions for viewing the livestream the day before and the day of the program. If you do not receive a message, please check your spam folder. Subject to availability, livestreaming tickets will be available via online purchase up until the program start time. If you need further assistance, please email public.programs@nyhistory.org.
Ticket Instructions:
Livestream tickets are available for purchase here or through the New-York Historical Call Center at (212) 485-9268, open 9 am – 5 pm daily.
In-person tickets to this public program, including the tour and program package, are sold out.
Members: For more information, contact membership@nyhistory.org.
Advance purchase is required to guarantee attendance. All sales are final; refunds and exchanges are not permitted. Programs and dates may be subject to change. Management reserves the right to refuse admission to latecomers. Program tickets do not include Museum admission unless otherwise noted.
Images: Robert Caro by Joyce Ravid
