Beverly Gage

G-Man runs past eight hundred pages and took Gage most of a decade. It is a life of J. Edgar Hoover that refuses both standard verdicts, treating him as a serious builder of American federal power rather than a cartoon, while setting out at length what he did with the Bureau's files and what he did to the civil rights movement in particular. It took the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2023, the Bancroft Prize the same year, and the National Book Critics Circle award. Gage teaches history and American studies at Yale, where she now holds the John Lewis Gaddis chair, and her earlier book The Day Wall Street Exploded examined the bombing of 1920.