Power Brokers on Robert Caro's 'The Power Broker'

Unless you’ve been off the grid for all of April, you’re probably aware of the fact that author and historian Robert Caro just published The Passage of Power, the fourth volume in his giant, omnibus biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson. All told, his writing about LBJ, which he’s been toiling away on since the 1970s, has reached 3,388 pages in length. As some have remarked, he’s spent more time writing about periods of LBJ’s life than the tall Texan spent living them.

No personal library in New York, however, seems complete without Robert Caro’s first hefty work—his monumental biography of the larger-than-life urban planner Robert Moses, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York—on prominent display. The paperback edition, with its thick, unmistakable red-and-white spine, is 1,344 pages long. It weighs around four and half pounds. Published in 1974, it was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. More than 300,000 copies of the book have been sold over the course of 30-plus printings, according to the publishing house Knopf.