Working

by Robert A. Caro

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.

Two hundred gallons in a day, much of it hauled up by a single person.

these were fifty-minute segments

So he ran the Parks Department from his real office, which was on Randall’s Island. There’s a building underneath the toll plaza of the Triborough Bridge, and that was his headquarters. No one could talk to him there unless he wanted to talk to them.

there and always reliable—to America’s 60 Families, written in 1937 by Ferdinand Lundberg.

There were about forty thousand boxes, she said; each had a theoretical capacity of eight hundred pages, but of course, she said, not all of them were completely filled, and some were over-filled;

Alan Hathway had given me that first piece of advice—“Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page”—I

“Money, kid, money.” Then he added: “But you’re never going to be able to write about that.” I asked why not. “Because you’re never going to find anything in writing,” he said.