Working

How the Work Gets Done

Robert Caro has spent most of his professional life writing two biographies: The Power Broker (Robert Moses) and the multi-volume The Years of Lyndon Johnson. At a total of several thousand pages of documentation, they represent the most sustained biographical effort in American letters. Working is his account of how he has done it — the methods, the philosophy, and the purpose behind decades of research that most writers could not imagine undertaking.

The book is organized around a series of reflections rather than a conventional memoir narrative: how he came to biography, how he conducts interviews, how he understands the relationship between a biographer and their subject, what he believes about the purpose of the work. The method he describes is essentially extreme: “turn every page” means reading every document in an archive, not sampling. Living in the Texas Hill Country to understand Johnson’s origins. Tracking down elderly sources who had never been interviewed because no previous researcher had thought to find them.

The Sources

The most valuable sections of Working are Caro’s accounts of specific research breakthroughs — the moments when the accumulated documentary work suddenly revealed something that changed his understanding of his subject. The interview with the woman in the Hill Country who finally told him about the sexual relationship between Johnson and Alice Glass. The archival discovery that confirmed the Box 13 fraud beyond any remaining doubt.

These accounts are also implicitly an argument for the kind of research Caro practices: that the truth about powerful people requires time, persistence, and the willingness to find sources that easier researchers miss. The truth is usually hidden, and finding it requires more work than most people are willing to do.

What Biography Is For

Caro’s deepest argument in Working is about purpose. He is not interested in biography as a form of literary entertainment or even as historical record, though it serves both functions. He is interested in biography as a tool for understanding how power actually operates in democratic societies — how it is accumulated, exercised, and used against the people it is nominally meant to serve. This is why the Johnson biography requires as many volumes as it does: the question Caro is answering cannot be answered more briefly.

Our rating: 4.7/5 — Caro’s memoir of his working methods is essential reading for anyone interested in biography, nonfiction research, or the question of what it actually takes to understand how power works.