Robert Caro, Calvin Trillin voted into arts academy

Historian Robert Caro, humorist Calvin Trillin and poet Paul Muldoon will be among the eight new members inducted next month into the elite American Academy of Arts and Letters, the academy announced Tuesday.

Caro, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is known for his biography of Robert Moses, "The Power Broker," and for his multivolume series on Lyndon Johnson. Trillin is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker who writes often about food and last year released a best-selling memoir about his late wife, Alice Trillin.

The Irish-born Muldoon won a Pulitzer in 2003 for "Moy Sand and Gravel."

Other inductees include fiction writer-essayist Joy Williams, artists Ursula von Rydingsvard and John Baldessari, African scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah and Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt. Gold medals for lifetime achievement will be presented to historian Edmund S. Morgan and architect Richard Meier.

Previous medal winners include Frank Gehry, Edith Wharton and Leonard Bernstein.

Founded in 1898, the academy is "an honor society of 250 architects, composers, artists, and writers," according to its Web site, with new members voted in as "vacancies occur." The academy's goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in the arts.

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