Robert Caro Working

Robert Caro’s Working, his meditation on life as an author and biographer, is a most delightful read. I am now a Robert Caro FAN!!! I maybe jumping on this bandwagon really late, but I am on it. Honestly, I read little by Robert Caro prior to Working. Mostly it was brief forays into his biography of Robert Moses and his first volumes on Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) for master’s or doctorate level papers. Despite the fact that I found the subject matter of the Moses biography appealing -- How could someone from Long Island not at least be intrigued by Robert Moses ?!?! – but the sheer size of it always frightened me away. Since my historical interests ranges from the end of the Civil War to the New Deal, there was not much room in an already overburdened reading time-budget for squeezing in the tomes on Moses and LBJ. As an environmental historian, most of what LBJ did on that topic, will come in the fifth, yet, unpublished volume. 

Nor did I think I would read Working. I heard Robert Caro discussing the book on two recent podcast episodes – C-Span’s Afterwords and the New York Times Book Review Podcast -- and I read his article “Turn Every Page” in the New Yorker. One might think that might reasonably cover all the content of a small book that is barely 200 pages. But the more I heard and read, the more intrigued I became; the more Caro pulled me in with his compelling behind-the-scenes account of six decades as a reporter and biographer. As an historian-biographer myself, how could I have not been drawn to this?  

I will never have the opportunity to teach a graduate level course on historical methodology, but if I did I would strongly consider this book for required reading. Why? Over the next few posts, I will explain the big takeaways that I got out of Working.