Robert A. Caro

 

Robert Allan Caro

Born:	October 30 1935 (1935--) (age 72) New York, New York
Occupation:	Biographer
Nationality:	American
Genres:	non-fiction

Robert Allan Caro (born October 30, 1935, New York, New York) is a biographer most noted for his studies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. After working years as a reporter Caro wrote The Power Broker (1974), a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses. Then he began the biographical series of the U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, known as The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982, 1990, 2002). Caro is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

In October 2007, Robert Caro will be a "Holtzbrinck Distinguished Visitor" at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany.

Background

In 1953, Caro graduated from the Horace Mann School, where he is known for translating 10,000 copies of his school newspaper into Russian and mailing them to schoolboys in the USSR ^[1]. In 1957 he received a degree in English from Princeton University, where he was managing editor of The Daily Princetonian. He was a Carnegie Fellow at Columbia University. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He began his professional career as a reporter with the New Brunswick Daily Home News in New Jersey. He also spent six years as an investigative reporter with the Long Island, New York newspaper Newsday.

The Power Broker

Main article: The Power Broker

After spending the academic year of 1966-67 as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, Caro began work on his first book, The Power Broker, which is both a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses and a study of Caro's favorite theme, the acquisition and use of power. Not finished until 1974, the work was based on extensive research and 522 interviews, including seven interviews with Moses himself, several with Michael Madigan (who worked for Moses for thirty-five years); and numerous interviews with Sidney Shapiro (Moses's General Manager for forty years); as well as interviews with men who worked for and knew Al Smith. His wife, Ina Caro, functioned as his research assistant. In fact, her master's thesis on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge stemmed from this work. The Power Broker was a commercial and critical success, winning the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best "exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist," and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century.

The Power Broker is widely viewed as a seminal work because it combined painstaking historical research with a smoothly flowing narrative writing style. The success of this approach was evident in his chapter on the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which Caro reported the controversy from all perspectives, including that of neighborhood residents. The result was a work of powerful literary as well as academic interest.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson

Main article: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

Following this success, Caro turned his attention to Lyndon B. Johnson. Caro retraced Johnson's life by temporarily moving to rural Texas and Washington, D.C., in order to better understand Johnson's upbringing and to interview anyone who had known Johnson. The work, entitled The Years of Lyndon Johnson, is projected to run to four volumes. The first, The Path to Power (1982) covers Johnson's life up to his failed 1941 campaign for the United States Senate. It won a National Book Critics Circle Award, 1983, a Washington Monthly Best Political Book Award, 1983, and an H.L. Mencken Award. The second volume, Means of Ascent (1990), commences in the aftermath of that defeat and continues through his election to that office in 1948. This volume won a National Book Critics Circle Award, 1990, and Washington Monthly Best Political Book Award, 1990. The third and most recent published volume, Master of the Senate (2002) chronicles Johnson's rapid ascent and rule as Senate Majority Leader; it garnered Caro a second Pulitzer Prize in Biography as well as a National Book Award, a Carl Sandburg Award, a John Steinbeck Award and a Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Caro is currently at work on the last volume, tentatively titled The Presidency.

Caro's books portray Johnson as alternating between scheming opportunist and visionary progressive. Caro argued, for example, that Johnson's victory in the 1948 runoff for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate was achieved through extensive fraud and ballot box stuffing. Caro also highlighted some of Johnson's campaign contributions, such as those from the Texas construction firm Brown and Root; in 1962 the company was acquired by another Texas firm, Halliburton, which became a major contractor in the Vietnam War. In addition, Caro argued that Johnson was awarded the Silver Star in World War II mainly for political reasons, and that he later lied to journalists and the public about the circumstances for which it was awarded. Despite these criticisms, Caro's portrayal of Johnson also notes his struggles on behalf of progressive causes such as the Voting Rights Act.

Family

His wife, Ina Caro, who sold the Caros' house so that work on The Power Broker could continue, and who was according to Robert Caro "the whole team" on all four of his books, the only person to do research on them; "the only person I would ever trust to do so;" is the author of her own book The Road from the Past: Travelling through History in France. When it was published in 1994, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., called it "the essential travelling companion ... for all who love France and its history." Commented Newsweek reviewer, Peter Prescott; "I'd rather go to France with Ina Caro than with Henry Adams or Henry James. The unique premise of her intelligent and discerning book is so startling that it’s a wonder no one has thought of it before." ^[2] Ina Caro is completing her second book.

Pop culture references

In the television series' The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horrors XVI" the character Lisa is seen reading Master of the Senate in the vignette "Bart A.I."

In the 2004 movie-remake of The Stepford Wives, the Stepford Women discuss Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson, mid-movie during an ominous 'book club' meeting.

Bibliography

• Caro, Robert A., The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. 1974. Alfred a Knopf Inc., New York. (ISBN 0394480767). ix + 1246 pp. + xxxiv pp. illus.
• Caro, Robert A., The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power. 1982. Alfred a Knopf Inc., New York. (ISBN 0394499735). xxiii + 882 p. + 48 p. of plates: illus.
• Caro, Robert A., The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. 1990. Alfred a Knopf Inc., New York. (ISBN 0394528352). xxxiv + 506 pp.
• Caro, Robert A., Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. 2002. Alfred a Knopf Inc, New York. (ISBN 0-394-52836-0). xxiv + 1167 pp.

References

1. ^ http://record.horacemann.org/article.php?id=345
2. ^ Book jacket of The Road from the Past, 1994

Source

• Zinsser, William Knowlton (ed.), Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography, Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0395486173

External links

• Robert A. Caro's Jan. 5, 1998 New Yorker article on Robert Moses and the writing of The Power Broker
• Robert Caro's official website
• Short essay about Caro by Morgan Meis.
• LOC.org video. Robert Caro discusses his new book on President Lyndon B. Johnson.
• American Academy in Berlin

Persondata
NAME	Caro, Robert A.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Caro, Robert Allan (full name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	biographer
DATE OF BIRTH	October 30, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH	New York, New York
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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