📝 Robert Caro’s Writing Routine

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Robert Caro is an American journalist and author best-known for The Power Broker, a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, and The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

When Robert Caro was asked by Stephen Harrigan during a Texas Monthly interview on why his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson was taking so long, Caro replied, “I believe that time equals truth.”

It would seem that Caro’s entire writing career has stuck closely to this belief. The former journalist and author has earned the reputation as one of the greatest biographers to have ever lived, due to his exhaustive research, pain-staking detail and riveting narrative themes weaving through the factual research, setting his work apart from other biographers.

“What’s most remarkable about Bob Caro is the depth, the obsessiveness, the accuracy of his research,” said Robert Gottlieb, who edits Caro’s books. “He simply never stops. He simply finds out more than anybody else finds out about anything. And then, out of the infinite detail he accumulates, he creates real drama.”

Caro’s 1974 book on New York public official Robert Moses, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, remains one of the most highly regarded and influential biographies of all time, and was written over a 7-year timespan, in which Caro almost went bankrupt and was forced to sell his house to continue writing. He is currently finishing the fifth and final volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, which he has been working on for over 40 years — the first volume, The Path to Power, was published in 1982.

Initially starting off as a journalist for the New Brunswick Daily Home News, then later as a investigative reporter with Newsday, Caro gravitated more towards longer, more detailed forms of writing. “I like being a reporter, but there was one aspect of it that I truly hated,” he said to Texas Monthly. “I never had enough time to really find out everything I thought I should know. I wanted to explore something all the way to the end.”

Since starting his work on The Power Broker in 1965, Robert Caro’s daily writing routine hasn’t changed all that much. Save for a few low points in his life, when he couldn’t afford his own office and had to write in the basement of his Bronx apartment, and then later in the Allen Room of The New York Public Library, Caro has spent most of his career working out of an office at Columbus Circle in Manhattan. More recently, after the office landlord had sold the building, Caro moved to a new office close to Central Park on the Upper West Side.

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Read the rest of Robert Caro’s writing routine here.

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