Robert Caro

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert A. Caro will deliver the George Huntington Williams Memorial Lecture at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 23, in Shriver Hall Auditorium on the Homewood campus.

Caro's lecture, "Power and Politics," will focus on the impact of personality and power on American politics.

Both of Caro's Pulitzer Prizes were for biography. He received the 1975 Pulitzer for his first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, and the 2003 Pulitzer for Master of the Senate, the third volume of his series The Years of Lyndon Johnson. To research President Johnson, Caro and his wife, Ina, moved from his native New York City to Johnson's home state of Texas and then to Washington, D.C., where Johnson had spent his political career. During these years, Caro examined documents at the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, and interviewed people connected to Johnson, from senators to courtroom clerks and administrative aides.

Caro has earned several other literary awards, including the Francis Parkman Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the H.L. Mencken Award, the Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. A graduate of Princeton, Caro was an investigative reporter at Newsday and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

The George Huntington Williams Memorial Lecture was established by Johns Hopkins in memory of the lecture's namesake, who was a pioneer in the microscopic study of rocks and minerals. Williams founded the university's Department of Geology (now the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences) in the late 1880s, teaching at the university until 1894. In 1917, his family created an endowment in his memory for lectures by distinguished public figures on topics of widespread contemporary interest. Past Williams lecturers include Desmond Tutu, former Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Texas) and Boris Yeltsin.

The lecture is presented in conjunction with the Office of the President and the Institute for Policy Studies and is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. For information, call 410-516-7157.

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