Career of a Pulitzer winner - Robert Caro

Takeaways from Robert Caro's book - 'Working'

Robert Caro is a Pulitzer-winning author known for his exhaustive research. He took more than 5 years to write his first(and successful) book - for which he had estimated 1 year¹. For his next ones, he took close to 10 years. He has a book, Working, in which he writes about his process. Below are my takeaways.

Photo by Giammarco Boscaro

Mortality

Caro intends to write a detailed memoir. He wrote Working now because he is unsure if he will live long enough to write it. He is currently working on the 5th of the five series book on Lyndon Johnson, former American president. I am in awe of his matter-of-fact approach to death. One of my professors used to make us write our obituaries - to drive the idea of mortality home which in turn helps you identify the things that are important to you².

Mentors

Reading Caro’s book reminded me of Stephen King’s On Writing. In his book, King talks about the time his editor taught him about editing in 5 minutes more than his entire writing education combined. Caro has a similar story where he learned to be an investigative reporter by ‘turning every page’ in the research material - as instructed by his supervisor. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear!

What to work on

Paul Graham has an insightful piece on how to do great work. Graham credits curiosity as the compass to identify what to work on. Caro appears to have done just that. Caro wanted to be a journalist - always³. He started his career as a journalist and realized that he wanted to be a journalist at a newspaper with ideals. He started working at just a newspaper and realized that he was curious about power - about how it is amassed. He became curious about the power that city planner Robert Moses wielded - and that became his first book.

Imposter Syndrome

Caro talks about how he felt he was a writer only after getting admitted to Allen Room - 5 years after starting to work on his first book. Allen Room, in New York Public Library, provided 11 writers with a desk to do their work. He felt he was taking too long to write the book - a worry further substantiated by the incredulous response of family and friends asking about how long he had been working on the book. He got the same question from the writers in Allen Room. But only instead of incredulity, the response was theirs took more years. And it helped that many of Caro’s peers in the Allen Room were authors that Caro looked up to. When you are doing hard things, it is very useful to have a community of similar-minded people.

Pursuit of Truth

Given how long it takes Caro to write the book, he frequently gets questioned as to why. Caro talks about how he needs to find answers to all the relevant questions. One example is about how he had to track down one individual and talk to him to get written evidence that the former American President had indeed stolen an election - the 1948 Texas senate election. It takes about 10 years to be an overnight success!

Listening

Caro’s technique to force the interviewee to talk was to write SU in his notebook - Shut Up. And the interviewees would fill in the silence with their responses. Listen twice, talk once!⁴

Caro’s book will go to my book recommendations.

1. Yours truly’s estimation skills are Caro-esque

2. Maybe that is what we should write instead of New Year resolution - New Year obituary!

3. Blessed are they who know what to do when they are young!

4. My goal for my 1:1s which I consistently fail!