G-Man
By Beverly Gage
- Genre
- Biography, Memoir & Autobiography
- Publisher
- Viking (Penguin Random House)
- Publication year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9780670025374
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century is a biography by the Yale historian Beverly Gage, published by Viking in November 2022. The roughly 800-page book won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Bancroft Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for nearly half a century, and Beverly Gage's G-Man is the first biography large enough to contain him. Across roughly 800 pages she traces Hoover from a Washington boyhood to the summit of American power, showing how he built a modern surveillance state while presenting himself as the guardian of ordinary virtue. Gage, a Yale historian, resists both demonology and apology; her Hoover is a gifted bureaucrat whose politics and prejudices shaped the century's persecutions of dissenters. intendle recommends it for readers who want to understand how institutions acquire and abuse power - and how one man's obsessions can outlast him. The book swept the major awards, winning the Pulitzer, the Bancroft and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is a monumental, coolly authoritative work that reads the American century through a single, unsettling life.