Robert Caro

Robert Allan Caro was born on October 30, 1935, in New York City, the son of Benjamin Caro, an immigrant from Warsaw, and Celia Mendelow Caro, who died when he was eleven and had asked, before she did, that he be sent to the Horace Mann School in Riverdale. He went on to Princeton University, where he majored in English, edited the Daily Princetonian, and wrote a senior thesis on Hemingway so long that Princeton afterward set a maximum length for theses still called the Caro rule. After briefly teaching at Rutgers, he spent six years as an investigative reporter for Newsday on Long Island, where an assignment on a bridge championed by Robert Moses left him convinced that everything he had believed about how power actually worked was wrong. A Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 1965 gave that conviction somewhere to go, and he set out to write what he expected would be a nine month biography of Moses. It took nearly seven years and was sustained, financially and otherwise, by his wife and research partner, Ina Caro, who at one point sold their house and returned to teaching so he could keep working. The Power Broker appeared in 1974 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography the next year. Caro then turned to Lyndon Johnson, publishing four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson between 1982 and 2012 and winning a second Pulitzer along the way, with a fifth volume still underway. He writes every draft in longhand on legal pads before typing it on a manual Smith Corona, tracking his output against a strict daily word count. He has been married to Ina since 1957, and they live in New York.

Reporting for Newsday on a bridge Robert Moses wanted built across Long Island Sound, Caro proved the engineering was unsound and thought he had killed it. The state assembly passed it anyway, on Moses's word alone. Driving home, he could not stop thinking that everything he had ever done as a reporter was worthless.