num_pages: 231
description: From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson: an unprecedented gathering of vivid candid deeply revealing recollections about his experiences researching and writing his acclaimed booksFor the first time in his long career Robert Caro gives us a glimpse into his own life and work in these evocatively written personal pieces. He describes what it was like to interview the mighty Robert Moses; what it felt like to begin discovering the extent of the political power Moses wielded; the combination of discouragement and exhilaration he felt confronting the vast holdings of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum in Austin Texas; his encounters with witnesses including longtime residents wrenchingly displaced by the construction of Moses Cross-Bronx Expressway and Lady Bird Johnson acknowledging the beauty and influence of one of LBJs mistresses. He gratefully remembers how after years of loneliness he found a writers community at the New York Public Librarys Frederick Lewis Allen Room and details the ways he goes about planning and composing his books. Caro recalls the moments at which he came to understand that he wanted to write not just about the men who wielded power but about the people and the politics that were shaped by that power. And he talks about the importance to him of the writing itself of how he tries to infuse it with a sense of place and mood to bring characters and situations to life on the page. Taken together these reminiscencessome previously published some written expressly for this bookbring into focus the passion the wry self-deprecation and the integrity with which this brilliant historian has always approached his work.
language: English
title: Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing
publisher: Penguin Random House