Chances are, serious fans
of biography keep on eye on the writer who is one of the greatest practitioners
in that genre, Robert Caro. The fourth volume of Caro’s biography of Lyndon
Johnson, The Passage of Power, has just come out--38 years after he began work
on volume one.
For Caro fans, two fine
articles about him and his writing methods are now out and available online.
First is Charles McGrath’s article in the April 12, 2012, issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine. The magazine's cover
headline was:
Robert Caro is a
dinosaur…and thank God for that
The other article is Chris
Jones’ Caro profile, titled “The
Big Book,” in the May 2012 issue of Esquire.
Here’s a little flavor
from McGrath’s piece:
“Caro is the last of
the 19th-century biographers, the kind who believe that the life of a great or
powerful man deserves not just a slim volume, or even a fat one, but a whole
shelf full. He dresses every day in a jacket and tie and reports to a
22nd-floor office in a nondescript building near Columbus Circle [in New York
City], where his neighbors are lawyers or investment firms. His office looks as
if it belongs to the kind of C.P.A. who still uses ledgers and a hand-cranked
adding machine. There are an old wooden desk, wooden file cabinets and a maroon
leather couch that never gets sat on. Here Caro writes the old-fashioned way:
in longhand, on large legal pads.”
I’ve been through the
first volume of the LBJ epic and, like many Caro fans, will never forget his
rendering of how electrification changed the lives of people in rural Texas. That
section moved writer Stephan Harrigan to remark in The Texas Monthly in a 1990 profile of Caro, “He took … what should have been
the most boring subject on earth—the advent of rural electrification—and turned
it into a chapter called ‘The Sad Irons,’ which may be the most brilliant
single passage of prose ever written about Texas.” (Caro, according to McGrath, spent several nights
sleeping alone in a sleeping bag in Texas Hill Country to better understand
rural isolation.)
Caro’s LBJ project is the
ultimate in exhaustive, in-depth reporting, involving thousands of interviews;
and perhaps, too, his attitude is the ultimate motivation for writers doing any
type or length of biographical work. In carrying out some of his research at
the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, Caro has been the first writer to open
some of the most revealing files there, McGrath says. “Over and over again,” he
tells McGrath, “I’ve found crucial things that nobody knew about. There’s
always original stuff if you look hard enough.”
-- Ron Kovach, senior
editor, The Writer