NEW YORK – Since the release a year ago of the acclaimed documentary “Turn Every Page,” Robert Caro has been feeling a bit like a movie star.
“I walk up Broadway and kids recognize me,” the historian and author of “The Power Broker” says. “If I linger a bit, they start talking about a chapter that they like. It’s so wonderful.”
The 88-year-old Caro, winner of virtually every literary prize, has long held at least semi-celebrity status. His better known admirers range from Conan O’Brien to former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and impatient readers regularly send emails to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, asking for an update on his fifth and final Lyndon Johnson book. (Still no release date in sight, Caro says.)
On this December morning, he’s seated at a small table in the gift shop of the New-York Historical Society, engaged in another kind of ritual for public figures: autographs, available to anyone who buys one of his books from the society’s store or website.
Caro has spoken around the country, and beyond, but he is also very much a New Yorker, a native Upper West Sider who used to visit the historical society as a kid and, for years, has lived close by. Every few weeks, he comes here and signs copies of his books, including the four Johnson volumes released so far and his debut publication “The Power Broker,” the landmark Robert Moses biography that next fall will be featured at a society exhibit marking its 50th anniversary.
The signings are not public events, although one local resident, 28-year-old Shiloh Frederick, came in person so the author could autograph her copy of “The Power Broker.” Frederick, who designs travel guides and other materials about New York City, has made several videos about Caro’s epic narrative of Moses’ reign as a municipal builder and its lasting impact.
“I was reading the book and it inspired all of these video ideas I wanted to share with other people,” she tells Caro.
“That’s the best thing I could hear,” he answers.
He signed dozens of books, which the society will ship to customers; he sometimes just includes his name and the name of the book’s owner, and he sometimes adds a personal message. One book was ordered by a 90-year-old priest in Rhode Island to whom Caro wishes a happy birthday. For a reader self-identified as a “young budding historian obsessed with history,” Caro inscribes, “To a fellow history lover.” For Frederick, he writes, “To Shiloh, who really understands.”
“This is incredible. I am going to cherish this,” Frederick says. “It’s getting a place of honor on my bookshelf.”
Historical society officials say “The Power Broker” is the most popular of the Caro books, understandable for a Pulitzer Prize winner that serves as an unofficial history of New York City in the 20th century. The NYHS, which acquired Caro’s archives in 2019, is calling the fall exhibit “Truth to Power,” featuring “interview notes, manuscript drafts, and other artifacts intimately connected with his writing process.”
As well explained in “Turn Every Page,” Caro and editor Robert Gottlieb fought bitterly while working on “The Power Broker,” cutting hundreds of thousands of words from a book that still ran over 1,000 pages. The deleted sections, predating the internet era, have an aura among Caro followers that lost studio recordings might have for Beatles fans. Readers have long wondered if Caro preserved a chapter on the urban theorist and community activist Jane Jacobs, who successfully pushed back against Moses in the 1950s and ’60s when he attempted to run an expressway through Lower Manhattan.
Caro grimaces when asked about the Jacobs section, not just because he’s heard about it so often, but because, he says, he has no specific idea what’s inside the boxes containing his “Power Broker” materials.
“I couldn’t stand to look at the stuff, so I never opened the boxes,” Caro says.
A society spokesperson declined to offer further details on the exhibit, saying it was too soon.
Interest in “The Power Broker” remains strong among the general public. The Moses biography has sold more than 17,000 copies this year, double the total of a decade ago, according to Circana, which tracks around 85% of print sales. During the height of the pandemic, “The Power Broker” appeared in the background during so many televised Zoom interviews, it became an unofficial status symbol.
The book inspires responses in other formats Caro never imagined while writing it. This fall, Frederick used her Instagram page to help lead an effort to tear down monkey statues widely regarded as racist that Moses had placed in a Harlem playground. The podcaster Roman Mars plans a yearlong tribute to Caro’s book on his show “99% Invisible,” his guests including O’Brien.
“My show is about architecture and design, and ‘The Power Broker’ is basically the bible of this,” Mars says. “It made people like me think about how cities are built, how highways are made.”
As readers await — and have awaited for more than a decade — the final Johnson volume, Caro’s appearance at the historical society is a break from what has been an intense few months of writing since Gottlieb’s death in June. The author has been working closely with Kathy Hourigan, who has served as a second editor on his books since he began the Johnson series in the 1970s. Hourigan is retiring this year as vice president and managing editor of Knopf Doubleday, part of a wave of buyouts at the publisher, but she will remain with Caro on a freelance basis.
The most Caro can say about the the fifth Johnson book is that it will be long, “very long.” He has noted often that he already knows the last line, but that he does not work chronologically. He speaks of completing a “poignant” section on the funeral of Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968. But he is currently deep into the year 1965, when Johnson signed historic legislation on everything from voting rights to Medicare, while also making the ill-fated decision to send ground troops to Vietnam.
“The Vietnam War is so depressing. Honest to god, you find yourself just about crying to (hear about) these young kids who had to fight in the jungle,” Caro says.
“The thing is,” he says of Johnson and 1965, “it’s everything about American power distilled through this one man, this one period.”
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