Robert Caro - Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing

The acclaimed, best-selling historian Robert A. Caro has written two of the most widely praised biographies of our time: The Power Broker, his exhaustive and essential 1974 study of New York’s long-reigning, so-called “Master Builder,” Robert Moses, still in print after 45 years; and the massive and groundbreaking The Years of Lyndon Johnson, four landmark volumes to date: The Path to Power (1982), Means of Ascent (1990), Master of the Senate (2002), and The Passage of Power (2012). Mr. Caro has won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography twice, the National Book Critics Circle Award for best non-fiction book of the year three times, and the National Book Award twice-once for lifetime achievement-along with countless other honors. Presenting Caro with the National Humanities Medal in in 2010, President Barack Obama declared that The Power Broker had “helped to shape how I think about politics.”
In a rare, widely reported break from his focus on his fifth LBJ volume, Mr. Caro has just published Working, a fascinating account of the painstaking process by which he researches and writes his brilliant books. Booklist called it “an engrossing and unexpectedly moving” collection that “fully illuminates why and how Caro has spent so many years working on his massive, contextually intricate, and courageous biographies…masterpieces of fact-gathering, analysis, and artistry.” And the New York Times observed: “Robert Caro probably knows more about power, political power especially, than anyone who has never had some.”
Roosevelt House is proud to present Robert Caro in conversation with Harold Holzer, the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Roosevelt House.
Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, May 13, 2019.