Robert A. Caro

He's the author of The Power Broker (1974), for which he won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize. It's a biography of Robert Moses, an urban planner and leading builder of New York City. President Obama said that he read the biography when he was 22 years old and that the book "mesmerized" him. Obama said, "I'm sure it helped to shape how I think about politics."Caro has also written four biographies on Lyndon Johnson, including The Path to Power (1982), Means of Ascent (1990), and Master of the Senate (2002), and The Passage of Power (2012), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He's at work on a fifth and final volume about Lyndon Johnson, which he says will take him a few more years still.From American Public Media