It was editor Alan Hathaway’s directive to turn every page, which is also the name of the Oscar-nominated documentary on Caro and his longtime book editor Robert Gottlieb, that led Caro to his spiritual work home: The nation’s archival research rooms and libraries, which preserve historical and cultural memory and transport him to the past.
Turning every page in archival research rooms is where ‘I felt at home’ He must know how the book will end before he can begin it, and he must dive deep into the archival papers of his subjects, turning nearly every page, to get the business of book writing done, Caro said in a conversation on craft with writer Brenda Wineapple at the New York Historical Society last month. Robert Caro (left) being interviewed by Brenda Wineapple at the New York Historical Society For Caro, his biographies must bring novelesque character-study nuance and prose, and a visceral sense-of-place, to his non-fiction works.
That investigative-reporting imperative, shorthand for leaving no research stone unturned when working on a story, would go on to fill the pages of Caro’s definitive texts for decades to come - from his Pulitzer Prize-winning first book on iconoclastic urban planner Robert Moses to his, perhaps, final book on President Lyndon Baines Johnson that impatient Caro fans await. In a lesson that would inform his life’s work, Robert Caro’s editor at 1960s-era Newsday implored the author of The Power Broker and Master of the Senate to, “Turn every page.” Robert Caro
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