Robert A. Caro Biography

Fast Facts

• Awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2010
• Accolades for his writing includes multiple Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Critics Circle Awards
• Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 1983
• Once served as a Carnegie Fellow at Columbia and later a Nieman Fellow at Harvard
• Majored in English at Princeton, where he served as the editor-in-chief of The Daily Princetonian
• Quote: "I try to make clear through my writing something which I believe: biography, or history in general, can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that that term․"
• Quote: "I trained myself to be organized․ If you're fumbling around trying to remember what notebook has what quote, you can't be in the room with the people you're writing about․"
• Began his career for small Northeastern dailies before writing non-fiction
• After gaining critical success from The Power Broker, he would begin working on his first biography of Lyndon B․ Johnson
• Began working on his first biographical novel, The Power Broker, in the late '60, but would not complete it until 1974 after more than a decade completing extensive research
• His wife Ina served as his personal research assistant on all of his books and even took a new job in order to help pay for the completion of The Power Broker
• While in high school, he translated his school's newspaper into Russian and mailed 10,000 copies to Russian school children