This Story Isn’t Over Yet
By JOE NOCERA, NYT
As a young man, Robert A. Caro was a newspaper reporter.
Caro is the painstaking, some would say obsessive (though he has always denied it) writer, whose first book, “The Power Broker," a 1,336-page biography of Robert Moses, took him seven years to complete — after which he turned to his true life’s work (perhaps even his true obsession), a multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson, the fourth volume of which, “The Passage of Power,” has just been published to great acclaim, reviewed in The New York Times by none other than former President Bill Clinton and which has been 36 years in the making. So far.
Working for a newspaper meant meeting deadlines, deadlines that, yes, allowed the paper to come out the next day, but also meant, all too often, compromises. Caro couldn’t repeat himself in a newspaper article; he couldn’t say the same thing five, six, seven times, until he was sure — absolutely sure — that the reader got the point. He couldn’t include all the many stray facts he had uncovered. Sometimes, words even had to be cut from a Robert A. Caro newspaper article — cut ruthlessly, mercilessly, by editors who didn’t understand the importance of those words, or the significance of those seemingly stray facts.
But once Caro turned to books, and, especially, once he began working on his L.B.J. biography in the mid-1970s, all the previous obstacles fell away. He would spend years — nay, decades — in the field, finding stray facts no one else had ever known existed. And then, when he started writing, he couldn’t stop. Other, lesser authors had deadlines, but not Caro. He turned in each volume only when he was ready, and sometimes a decade passed between volumes — so much time, in fact, that he began quoting his previous books in his newer books. Originally intended to be three volumes, written over maybe a half-dozen years, his L.B.J. biography eventually stretched to four, and then five. The fifth, which Caro has yet to write, is supposed to be the last one.
There was something unquestionably awe-inspiring about Caro’s quest to create a biography as big as Johnson’s life. The third volume, especially, entitled “Master of the Senate” — Caro’s 1,167-page account of Johnson’s years as the Senate majority leader — was immediately hailed as one of the greatest illuminations of power ever written.
(More here.)
As a young man, Robert A. Caro was a newspaper reporter.
Caro is the painstaking, some would say obsessive (though he has always denied it) writer, whose first book, “The Power Broker," a 1,336-page biography of Robert Moses, took him seven years to complete — after which he turned to his true life’s work (perhaps even his true obsession), a multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson, the fourth volume of which, “The Passage of Power,” has just been published to great acclaim, reviewed in The New York Times by none other than former President Bill Clinton and which has been 36 years in the making. So far.
Working for a newspaper meant meeting deadlines, deadlines that, yes, allowed the paper to come out the next day, but also meant, all too often, compromises. Caro couldn’t repeat himself in a newspaper article; he couldn’t say the same thing five, six, seven times, until he was sure — absolutely sure — that the reader got the point. He couldn’t include all the many stray facts he had uncovered. Sometimes, words even had to be cut from a Robert A. Caro newspaper article — cut ruthlessly, mercilessly, by editors who didn’t understand the importance of those words, or the significance of those seemingly stray facts.
But once Caro turned to books, and, especially, once he began working on his L.B.J. biography in the mid-1970s, all the previous obstacles fell away. He would spend years — nay, decades — in the field, finding stray facts no one else had ever known existed. And then, when he started writing, he couldn’t stop. Other, lesser authors had deadlines, but not Caro. He turned in each volume only when he was ready, and sometimes a decade passed between volumes — so much time, in fact, that he began quoting his previous books in his newer books. Originally intended to be three volumes, written over maybe a half-dozen years, his L.B.J. biography eventually stretched to four, and then five. The fifth, which Caro has yet to write, is supposed to be the last one.
There was something unquestionably awe-inspiring about Caro’s quest to create a biography as big as Johnson’s life. The third volume, especially, entitled “Master of the Senate” — Caro’s 1,167-page account of Johnson’s years as the Senate majority leader — was immediately hailed as one of the greatest illuminations of power ever written.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home