Beverly Gage, John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History, will present on her new book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

Beverly Gage’s monumental work 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, 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. 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.

At Yale, Beverly Gage teaches courses on American politics, government, and social movements. From 2017 to 2021, she served as director of Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. In 2021, President Joe Biden nominated her to serve on the National Humanities Council, the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities.