Today’s the 50th anniversary of the publication date of The Power Broker by Robert Caro. I didn’t read it until about two years ago, and to say it was transformative is no hyperbole. One of the most riveting books I’ve ever read, fiction or non. Read the book, it’s history, it’s urban planning, it’s NYC, it’s also a biography of a racist sociopath.

It’s also what turned me on to bigass nonfiction. Because of The Power Broker, I no longer hesitate to pick up books like The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Team of Rivals, or The Executioner’s Song (and you should read all three of those as well)

Because of the anniversary, there are lots of new articles about it. First, the NYT makes the case for reading it (gift link) better than I can:

Moses, in Caro’s telling, was nearly as autocratic and cultishly revered as Mao, all but unchallenged as he went about imprinting his ideas of urban improvement on the seat of the American imperium.

The facts alone are remarkable. But what captivated Caro’s readers in 1974 and speaks to us now is his vivid account of how Moses did what he did, decade after decade, from the high-flying ’20s up through the “crisis of the city” in the ’60s and ’70s. Moses outmaneuvered governors and mayors, dictated policies to legislators and manipulated public opinion with the aid of a supine press. (The worst long-term offender, sad to say, was The New York Times.) He became, in sum, the prototype of a type we now know all too well, the mogul politician who operates with open contempt for “institutions and the law.”

This one from Curbed goes into Caro’s current work and his work setup, and includes a lot of trivia about the book — there’s an exhibit at the New-York Historical Society on now about him and the book:

When The New Yorker published excerpts of The Power Broker, Caro flipped when he received a galley with all the magazine’s fussy edits — lots of commas in, lots of paragraph breaks out — and demanded that it be put back as it was. “That was one of the worst days of my life,” he says. “They had softened it all down.” Squaring off with William Shawn, the magazine’s editor at the time…was unthinkable for a broke freelancer, but he did it… And for one week there was a complete standoff, and then he gave in.”

Then today in LitHub, 50 facts about The Power Broker. Here are some key bits:

• Caro thought he could finish The Power Broker in nine months, but it took him seven years, three publishers, and two editors
• Writing The Power Broker also nearly bankrupted him
• Caro rarely uses a computer (though the Johnson presidential library made him use a laptop after staff complained about the clacking of his typewriter) 

I haven’t seen Turn Every Page yet, but today seems like as good a time as any.

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