The Power Broker.

CARO, Robert A. [Philip Roth].

$15,000.00

Item Number: 141292

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.

First edition of the author’s Pulitzer-Prize winning work on Robert Moses. Thick octavo, original black cloth, cartographic endpapers. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page to fellow writer Philip Roth on the half-title page, “For Philip from Robert A. Caro.” Roth first gained attention with the 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the  National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy’s Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s literary alter-ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth serves as narrator for some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America, Roth went on to be one of the most honored American writers of his generation. Roth received the National Book Critics Circle award for The Counterlife, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain and Everyman, a second National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Paul Bacon. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. From the library of Philip Roth. An exceptional association linking these two giants of American letters.

One of the most acclaimed books of our time, winner of both the Pulitzer and the Francis Parkman prizes, the Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the city's politics but of its physical structure and the problems of urban decline that plague us today. "Surely the greatest book ever written about a city" (David Halberstam). Theodore H. White called it "A masterpiece of American reporting. It's more than the story of a tragic figure or the exploration of the unknown politics of our time. It's an elegantly written and enthralling work of art."