Beverly Gage, the author of “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century,” has been named the winner of the New-York Historical Society’s 2023 Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize, which is awarded annually for the best work of American history or biography.
The first major biography of Hoover written in three decades, “G-Man” draws on a wealth of previously unseen or uncensored documents, including many obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Over 837 pages, Gage, a professor at Yale University, takes a panoramic view of Hoover’s 48 years as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, looking not just at his infamous harassment campaigns against civil rights leaders in the 1960s but also his central role in the modernization of the bureau, which often won him the admiration of liberals.
Reviewing the book last year in The New York Times, Jennifer Szalai called it a “revelatory” portrait that shows Hoover “for who he really was — less an outsider to the so-called postwar consensus than an integral part of it.”
Gage’s book, published by Viking, was also a winner of this year’s Bancroft Prize, awarded by Columbia University and considered one of the most prestigious honors in the field of American history, as well as a bellwether of trends among academic historians.
The historical society’s prize, which will be awarded at a private event in April, rewards books that are accessible to a general audience. It often focuses on political history, and books that keep founders, presidents and other major figures, and their great deeds (or misdeeds), at the center of the story. Past winners of the prize, which comes with a cash award of $50,000, have included Alan Taylor, Jill Lepore, Jane Kamensky and Gordon S. Wood.
In a news release, Agnes Hsu-Tang, the chair of the historical society’s board of trustees, said that Gage “deftly illuminates one of the most complicated personalities in modern American history through descriptive gradations of light and shadow.”
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