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| Robert Caro | |
An exhibit called "Turn Every Page": Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive opens October 24 at the New-York Historical Society in New York City; it is the first public exhibition drawn from the archive of the author of award-winning biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. The Society acquired the archive in 2019.
Beginning with Caro's early career as a student journalist at Princeton and later as an investigative reporter for Newsday, the exhibit highlights his research for both The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson (and the years of reporting he did for those books) as well as his rigorous process of interviewing, writing, and editing. The exhibit includes research notebooks, handwritten interview notes, scrapbooks, photographs, original manuscript pages and one of Caro's Smith Corona Electra 210 typewriters.
Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society, said the exhibition offers a "window into his process, his thinking, and his writing. It also underscores the value investigative journalism has in historical research, and Caro's extraordinary ability to uncover as well as convey--brilliantly, and with clarity and elegance--the essence of power. That Caro's research and writing will be permanently on view in our building attests to his monumental standing as a biographer and historian."
For his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Caro won the Pulitzer Prize twice, the National Book Award twice, the National Book Critics Circle Award three times, and almost every other major literary honor, including the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Francis Parkman Prize. In 2008, he was awarded the New-York Historical Society's History Makers Award, and in 2013, he received its American History Book Prize for The Passage of Power. In 2010, President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal.
On October 24, the New-York Historical Society is holding a symposium related to the exhibit, including a keynote by Caro; a discussion on History and Integrity in an Age of Misinformation featuring Bob Woodward and Douglas Brinkley; and a panel on Making History Matter featuring William P. Kelly, Lisa Lucas, Jane Mayer and Brenda Wineapple.