The Cosmos Club is honored to present the 47th Cosmos Club Award to Robert A. Caro, biographer and historian, in recognition of a lifetime of sustained excellence as researcher and author on political history, notably as the authoritative biographer of President Lyndon Johnson. His in-depth analyses are as eloquently written as they are scholarly and precise.
Robert Caro’s books about New York developer Robert Moses and politician Lyndon Johnson have won him two Pulitzer Prizes and other national awards as well as exceptional respect and admiration: “Caro has a unique place among American political biographers,” wrote the Boston Globe. “He has become, in many ways, the standard by which his fellows are measured.” Historian Michael Beschloss hailed The Path to Power—how Johnson escaped poverty, campaigned for office, and rigged elections—as “a monument of interpretive biography. Caro is an inexhaustible researcher and a meticulous historian. This epic book combines the social scientist’s interest in power with the historian’s concern with theme and context, the political scientist’s interest in system, and the novelist’s passion to reveal the inner workings of the personality and relate them to great human issues.” Robert Caro believes that “biography—history in general—can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.” May his works continue to live up to this vision and continue to do so clearly, eloquently, and with elegance.
