Robert Caro, 90, Has Written 983 Pages of His Final LBJ Volume

A biographer who has spent decades writing about a president who changed the world. Robert Caro is ninety years old and has been working on The Years of Lyndon Johnson — the most ambitious biographical project in twentieth-century American literature — for forty-four years. Last week, in a C-SPAN interview, he held up a thick sheaf of papers and said: “I have written 983 pages. This is this, OK? This is the rest of the book.”

There is something that moves me about that image, in the best possible way. A ninety-year-old man standing with his pages, announcing that he has not finished. That there is still more.

The series began in 1982 with The Path to Power, the first volume on Johnson’s early years. The second arrived in 1990. The third, Master of the Senate, in 2002. The fourth, The Passage of Power, in 2012. Four books across forty years, all of them considered masterworks of the biographical genre. The series has accumulated a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and two National Book Critics Circle Awards. And the ending still hasn’t come.

The fifth volume will cover the period from LBJ’s landslide victory in 1964 — the crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater — through Johnson’s death in 1973. These are the years of the Great Society and Vietnam, of the grandest promise and costliest failure in twentieth-century American presidential history. When asked when the book might arrive, Caro answered with a honesty rarely heard in publishing: “Fair question.” He gave no date.

What Caro practices is almost the inverse of the contemporary publishing market. In a world where books are written in months and announced long before they exist, Caro works with the patience of a medieval craftsman. “I have to have it all outlined. I can’t just start writing.” And nobody sees anything until it’s done.

I read that as a kind of short poem about the respect owed to writing. Books that take decades to arrive tend to be the ones that remain for decades after arriving. Not always — but in Caro’s case, always.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson is already one of the great works of English-language nonfiction. When the fifth volume appears — and it will appear, because Caro has 983 pages that prove it — it will be one of the literary events of the decade.