Working

by Robert A. Caro

It’s not a full-scale memoir. I am, in fact, planning to write such a memoir and readers who prefer longer books will not be unhappy with its length. That one will describe in some detail my experiences in researching and writing my biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson—my experiences in learning about these two men and their methods of acquiring and using power—and it will describe also the efforts that were made to keep me from learning about these men (or their methods); in writing those biographies, I tried to keep myself out of their narratives, and seem to have done so with such success that over and over again I get asked what it was like to do them. Here, in this current book, instead, are some scattered, almost random glimpses of a few encounters I’ve had while doing the research on the Moses and Johnson biographies, encounters both with documents and with witnesses. There are also a few things I’ve learned or discovered, or think I’ve learned or discovered, about the writing of biography and indeed nonfiction in general that I’d like to share or pass along for whatever they’re worth to other writers and to readers interested in nonfiction. And here also are a few things I discovered about myself along the way—starting with a long-ago Election Day in the very tough political town of New Brunswick, New Jersey, when, a wet-behind-the-ears journalist fresh out of Princeton, I found myself “riding the polls” (I didn’t even know what the term meant when I was ...