The American Century: J. Edgar Hoover's Legacy

The 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Biography has been awarded to a work that has also been recognized with the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the 43rd LA Times Book Prize in Biography. This book has been named a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and has been praised as a "Masterful...enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography [that] now becomes the definitive work" by The Washington Post. It has been described as "A nuanced portrait in a league with the best of Ron Chernow and David McCullough" by The Wall Street Journal.

This major new biography of J. Edgar Hoover draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today's conservative political landscape. The book explores the full sweep of Hoover's life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family through his death in 1972.

In her nuanced and definitive portrait, the author, Beverly Gage, shows how Hoover was more than a one-dimensional tyrant and schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission. As FBI director from 1924 through his death in 1972, he was a confidant, counselor, and adversary to eight U.S. presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats. While Hoover was not above blackmail and intimidation, he also embodied conservative values ranging from anticommunism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity. This garnered him the admiration of millions of Americans, and he stayed in office for so long because many people, from the highest reaches of government down to the grassroots, wanted him there and supported what he was doing, thus creating the template that the political right has followed to transform its party.

G-Man places Hoover back where he once stood in American political history—not at the fringes, but at the center—and uses his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century. The book has been named a Best Book of 2022 by The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian Magazine, and a New York Times Top 100 Notable Books of 2022.

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