Finding Inspiration in Non-Fiction: Robert Caro's Working

Have you read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron? I confess that I’ve only read a few chapters but I loved the idea of filling the well. For me, this means going to a museum, or going to the theatre or ballet. A few weeks, I dragged myself to The New York Historical Society. The purpose was to see the Real Clothes: Real Lives - Two Hundred Years of What Women Wore, the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection but I found myself fascinated by the exhibition highlighting the 50 year anniversary of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker.

The Power Broker is Robert Caro’s first work of non-fiction. The book’s subject is New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, the man responsible for building Jones Beach, most of the bridges and expressways in New York City over the course of 40 something years. Most people outside of New York had never heard of Robert Moses until Knopf published The Power Broker in 1974 but it became an immediate bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. This book is so influential that it was the inspiration for David Hare’s play Straight Line Crazy starring Ralph Fiennes as Robert Moses. The podcast 99% Invisible is devoting an entire season to reading The Power Broker.

When Caro first decided to write about Moses, he thought it would only take him nine months to research and write the book. Instead it took him seven years. He left his job at Newsday, his wife sold their house (without telling him) to support them because his advance for the book was $2,500. They moved to a tiny apartment in the Bronx while he wrote the book. During the seven years he was writing, his editor left the publishing house, and his new agent resold the book to Knopf. The book tops out at 1,100 which is about the same length as Gone with the Wind.

Caro donated his archive to the New York Historical Society and there is a permanent exhibition at the museum chronicling his work on not just The Power Broker but also the four volumes of his Lyndon Baines Johnson biography. I was so fascinated by his process, which is also detailed in the documentary Turn Every Page about his relationship with his late editor Robert Gottlieb. The exhibition contrasts his early drafts with the finished product, there is his Smith-Corona typewriter that he’s used to write his books, and details about his research.

After my visit to the museum, I took out a copy of Robert Caro’s book Working which is part memoir/part craft book. Caro’s book is a fantastic read if you are interested in the process of writing, researching and learning to respect your process as a writer. Caro’s goal in writing The Power Broker was that he wanted to understand political power on a local level, how one gains it, keeps it, and eventually loses it through the lens of one man Robert Moses. With LBJ, it was political power on a national scale that he was examining. But Caro soon realized that he needed to expand his purview and show how wielding that power effected people like the residents of the East Tremont neighborhood in the Bronx or the residents of the Hill Country in Texas, who because of LJB, finally had electricity.

True confession, I had absolutely no desire to read The Power Broker or his LBJ biographies but I’m so fascinated to learn his process for doing so. Is that weird? I mean, I book out a copy of Libba Bray’s book The Diviners out of the library and blanching at the fact that it’s almost 500 pages. And I used to love to read long books, especially family sagas. Anyone remember John Jakes Kent Family Chronicles? Each of those books, I swear, was at least 500 to 600 pages long. After reading working, I may just have to pick up a copy of The Power Broker. I’m definitely obsessed with Caro and how he writes.

I wrote Scandalous Women in less than a year, writing thirty-five mini-biographies, while researching, reading over 70 books. For the first volume of his LBJ biography, he and his wife moved to the Hill Country of Texas because Caro felt that he needed to understand the world that Johnson sprang from. He realized that he couldn’t get the people who lived in Johnson City who knew Johnson as a child or in college unless he lived amongst them. One of the most striking moments for me was when Caro wrote that he got up early in the morning to walk to the Capitol building at the same time that Johnson did so that he could see what Johnson saw every day.

You have to admire Caro’s thoroughness and tenacity. He would interview people multiple times, asking them what Johnson was doing at certain times. He managed to get Lyndon Johnson’s brother to tell him stories about Johnson that he’d never shared with any biographer. While writing The Power Broker, he finally got Robert Moses to sit down and talk to him after Moses spent years trying to block Caro from speaking to any of his former associates. It’s fascinating to read about how Caro managed to get access to Robert Moses papers by meeting someone who knew where the carbon copies were kept.

Robert Caro has spent the past almost 50 years just researching LBJ, writing four volumes of biography. He’s currently writing book five which will cover LBJ’s presidency and the end of his life. Caro writes in long-hand on legal pads. He sometimes writes two or three drafts in long-hand! He doesn’t use a computer, he types all his drafts on legal size paper, triple-spaced, a practice that he picked up when he was a reporter. He’s always searching for a better way to phrase something or to describe something for the reader so that they can see the image in their mind. In a recent New York Magazine article, he learned about Google docs for the first time! He doesn’t have a team of researchers, his wife Ina is his only researcher. She’s a writer in her own right. If you are interested in French history, I suggest picking up a copy of her book Paris to the Past: Traveling through French History by train. Caro tries to write 900 to 1000 words a day (2-4 pages).

If Caro has the patient and tenacity to research LBJ for all these years, I shouldn’t complain about the two years that I’ve spent writing and researching my current manuscript. I actually felt inspired after reading Working. Also, Caro just celebrated his 89th birthday and he still goes to his office five days a week, wearing a shirt and tie no less, to write the final volume which he’s been working on for the past thirteen years.

If Robert Caro had only written The Power Broker, it would still stand as an amazing achievement. The article in New York Magazine pointed out that anyone interested in writing a new biography of New York Governor Al Smith, the first Irish-Catholic to run for President of the United States and the man responsible for appointing Moses, has Caro to thank for donating his research to the New York Historical Society.