G-Man : J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography 2023
Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography
Winner of the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy
Winner of the American History Book Prize
Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Longlisted for the CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction

When he became director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater into a modern machine. He stayed in power for decades, and created a personal fiefdom unrivalled in US history.

In this masterful, multi-award-winning biography, Beverley Gage explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career. In Gage’s portrait, Hoover was a man admired by millions, but was also a formidable public figure who intimidated his enemies, excluded minorities from his great American project and created the foundations of the US far right.

G-Man is a dramatic portrait of one of America’s most influential – and controversial – public figures. It is also an engrossing story of the making of modern America.

'Revelatory' New York Times

'Astonishing' The New Yorker

'Masterful…This book is an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography [that] now becomes the definitive work' The Washington Post