2024 has been an entertaining year in the United States politically speaking. Not only because of the recent presidential elections, but also because of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Power Broker, the biography about Robert Moses, considered one of the best biographies ever written.
Its author, Robert Caro, a living legend on the other side of the Atlantic, although relatively unknown on this one, took from 1966 to 1974 to write this monumental biography of more than a thousand pages (and almost a million words!) for which He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Not content with this work, he immediately began a five-volume series on the life of President Lyndon Johnson, a series still incomplete, since the fifth volume is yet to be published. This work, which now exceeds 3,000 pages, also earned him a second Pulitzer Prize in 2003. For those who wish to glimpse a glimpse of Robert Caro’s working methods, in 2019 he published a collection of writings and interviews under the qualification Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, where we learn what the incubation and gestation process of his two great masterpieces was.
Given the extraordinary effort it takes to dedicate one’s entire life to studying and documenting the lives of just two men, it’s natural to wonder what kinds of habits (and mindset) are needed. to carry out a task of such magnitudeas well as whether some of these habits can be applied to more routine tasks.
After completing his studies in English philology in 1957, Robert Caro worked for several years as a reporter for various newspapers. Although he was initially satisfied with these jobs, the constant pressure to meet deadlines and the lack of time to research as thoroughly as he liked led him to abandon journalism to focus on writing The Power Broker. The enormous power that Moses exercised throughout his long career, which has earned him fame as the builder of modern New York, is what sparked Caro’s curiosity about the character. As he explains: “Robert Moses was never elected to anything. And yet, Robert Moses held power for forty-four years, between 1924 and 1968, through the administrations of five mayors and six governors and, in the areas in which he decided to exercise it, his power was so enormous that no mayor or governor stood up to him.
“However, before embarking on his career as a biographer, the editor of one of these newspapers offered Caro the following advice, which would become the lodestar of his meticulous way of working from then on (and which is the name from a recent documentary produced by Sony): “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every damn page.” Although it took Caro eight years to finish The Power Broker, he considers himself a fast writer. And it’s not a joke. Those who visit the New York History Museum will be able to see in the exhibition dedicated to Robert Caro that the author has kept a record of the words he wrote every day throughout his life. On most of these days, he was able to write about 1,000 words (equivalent to about three pages), which gives an idea of the speed with which he is capable of writing. What explains, then, why he takes so long to write his biographies, despite being such a prolific writer? First, Caro adopts a deliberately slow pace in the various stages of his creative process. For example, your first drafts are always longhand, allowing you to more clearly organize your thoughts and precisely shape sentence structure. Once the first draft is finished, he transcribes it cleanly using triple spacing and using his Smith-Corona Electra 210 typewriter, a practice he continues to do even with the advanced word processors we have today. This triple spacing, in turn, makes it easy for you to meticulously review and rewrite each page as many times as necessary – and it’s usually many times.
However, the main reason for such long gestation periods is what Caro calls “the sense of place”, that is, that the “reader can visualize the physical setting in which the action of a book takes place: let’s see it clearly enough, with enough detail, so that he feels as if he himself were present while the action unfolds.”It is this cost in hours to create such a “sense of place” that is extremely high. Not only because of the more than 522 interviews that Caro conducted at the time of writing The Power Broker (for Johnson’s series, Caro simply lost count), but because he sometimes adapted his life to delve into the experiences of the characters he describes. A notable example is his decision, along with his family, to move to the Hill Country, a small rural town in Texas, where they lived for three years to fully understand the environment that marked Lyndon Johnson’s childhood. One of the chapters that best reflects Caro’s obsession with recreating scenes with almost cinematic thoroughness is chapter 37 of The Power Broker, titled One Mile.
In it, Caro seeks to convey to the reader the human cost and collateral effects that Moses’ works very often entailedchronicling the construction of the Cross-Bronx Highway. This road cut through the middle of the East Tremont neighborhood in the Bronx, and this particular stretch was simply one of the 627 miles of highways that Moses built throughout his career. The execution of this work involved the eviction of thousands of homes and the destruction of the sense of community of the remaining neighbors. The majority of these residents had very low incomes, and had to end up living in very remote areas and with destroyed lives in many of these cases.
To conclude, I would like to end with a beautiful reflection from Conan O’Brien, a prominent American comedian and a fervent admirer of Caro. In his recent participation in a podcast series dedicated to studying The Power Broker chapter by chapter, O’Brien highlighted the importance of Caro’s work, not only as extremely well-researched biographies, but as texts that transcend the ephemeral contents of the times in which we live, thanks to a philosophy of dedication and attention to detail that permeates them from beginning to end:
“I like to contrast Robert Caro with the current times. If you think about it, everything is so fast. Everything seems so ephemeral. […] Series come and go. Television comes and goes. The entertainment – almost like a magician who has gunpowder – things explode and there’s a big spark and we all say, “Wow!” And, puff, then it disappears.
And while all this is happening, you contrast him with this man who has spent his entire life essentially writing about these two people, actually, most of his life writing about a man and doing it his way, without compromises, very quietly, in a very small office. […] And working on a Smith Corona typewriter that was built in 1969. And he has this dedication to what he’s doing that it almost feels like it’s similar to the Egyptians building a pyramid. Most of the people who were working on a pyramid didn’t even live to see it half-built, let alone finished. What this man is doing does not belong at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. It is completely timeless.
Robert Caro and his work make me feel trivial in the same way that looking at a plateau in a desert makes me feel trivial. […] Robert Caro is the closest thing to a geological formation. Your work […] It is similar to witnessing a lava eruption and the movement of tectonic plates that will form something. And it will last as long as civilization lasts, which is at least another 40 years.”
‘Technical sheet’
Title: “Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing”
Author: Robert Caro.
Publisher: Bodley Head, 2019, pp.240, hardcover.
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