Caro is the greatest living American biographer, famous for long, deeply researched, massively complex books about President Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Moses, the man who built New York, which take as much as a decade or more to write. He starts all his mammoth projects the same way: He fills in the box on the right. “What is this book about?,” he asks himself. “What is its point?” He forces himself to “boil the book down to three paragraphs, or two, or one.”[16] These paragraphs express the narrative theme with perfect simplicity.
