We Rediscovered Robert Caro’s Abandoned Novel About an Intrepid Journalist Buried in His Archives
A deep dive into the legendary biographer’s papers leads to the surprising revelation of a work he has all but forgotten
Robert Caro’s fame rests on his epic works of historical nonfiction—The Power Broker, his disposition of urban planner Robert Moses, and his four-volume-and-counting biography of Lyndon B. Johnson—but to succeed in writing history, he has said, “the prose must be written at the same level as a work of fiction.” He once spent a summer flipping back and forth between Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, striving to understand how Gibbon, in a work of narrative history Caro considered fiction’s equal, maintained the same intensity and virtuosity as Tolstoy. How, in other words, he transformed a chain of compelling facts into a story.
Over the years, Caro, 89, has also mentioned taking more specific inspirations from fiction. In recent conversations for a story in the March issue of Smithsonian, about the opening of the historian’s research archives in New York, Caro detailed to me the habits he took from Ernest Hemingway, for example—writing early in the morning, before doing anything else; keeping a daily word tally; and quitting for the day when he knows where he’ll start when he sits back down at his typewriter the next morning. And he has sometimes talked of teaching himself how to interview subjects from two fictional masters of the craft: John Le Carré’s spy extraordinaire, George Smiley, and Georges Simenon’s French police detective, Inspector Maigret. “The thing about both of them is that they’re quiet and patient,” Caro once explained. “They let the other person talk and really listen to what he’s saying. Maigret takes out his pipe and refills it and taps it on the table. Smiley takes his glasses off and wipes them on his necktie.”
The results of Caro’s close study have fed into the nonfiction books that made his name. But back when he was a student at Princeton University, in the 1950s, Caro wrote fiction of his own. He has talked with evident pride about how one story he wrote—apparently about a boy who gets his girlfriend pregnant—took up most of an issue of the Princeton Tiger humor and literary magazine. I found further examples in Princeton’s Nassau Literary magazine, where Caro was on staff. The earliest, “Thirty Second Break,” from March 1954, is about a jaded trumpet player wondering whether to risk it all for a chance to play the music he wants to; the story ends with him having failed to take the leap, trapped in a life he hates. “Salt Water Baptism,” published the following month, is about a blowhard trial lawyer who shames himself in front of his son by taking on a swim he shouldn’t attempt to a platform too far from shore. That fall came “The Mile,” about a champion athlete who, after being forced into retirement by a life-threatening health problem, can’t resist a final race. Finally, a year later, “The Glitter and the Glare,” much lengthier than the others, was about a nightclub chanteuse facing middle-aged obsolescence who mentors a young Puerto Rican wunderkind grappling with racism and his own demons.
Since Caro graduated from Princeton in 1957, not a single further word of his fiction has been printed anywhere. But, as I researched Caro’s life and work, I discovered that this does not mean none was ever written. Occasionally I would stumble across fleeting mentions of a novel-in-progress. From a July 1974 Newsday article, published around the time Caro’s first career-establishing book, The Power Broker, appeared: “Knopf also has contracted for a novel by Caro, which he says is almost finished.” In November 1976, New York magazine ran a one-paragraph article headlined “Caro Writing Newspaper Novel.” The author’s smiling photo, captioned “Caro: Juggling fiction and LBJ,” ended this way: “he’s also turning out a novel about journalism, focusing on an investigative reporter … sort of a busman’s holiday for Caro, who spent six years as an investigative reporter for Newsday.” In September 1977, a short article in the Ithaca Journal describing a speaking engagement noted that “Caro is writing a soon-to-be-published novel about the newspaper business.” More than five years after that, in November 1982, another article in Newsday, about his first Johnson book, offered this: “Part of his deal with Knopf involves a novel he wrote after finishing The Power Broker. Knopf bought it, but nobody is saying when it will be published. The book, currently titled The Powers of the Press, focuses on Washington and Albany. Its pivotal character is an investigative reporter.”
To this day, not a word to Caro’s novel has appeared. But, inspecting the partially completed index of Caro’s newly opened archive at New York Historical ahead of meeting him there, I noticed something. Box 115 was said to contain 15 folders of material from this unfinished work. I asked for it to be available during our visit.
“I haven’t looked at that in decades,” Caro says, picking up what appears to be the earliest surviving draft of the novel’s beginning. The draft appears to be titled not The Powers of the Press but News Man: A Novel, though Caro now remembers the project under a third title: The Ladies in the Lobby. It was based upon something he says he observed, time and time again, when he worked at Newsday between 1959 and 1967. People—typically women—having exhausted every other means to be heard, would turn up at a newspaper office, hoping to find someone who would listen. Caro points to the book’s second paragraph, which lays this out in detail. In its own way, it hits what would become two classic intertwined Robert Caro themes: the ever-elusive quest for justice and how the important stuff that determines how things really work is located somewhere different from where everyone routinely assumes it to be.
A lady in the lobby. Someday, he had often thought, journalism professors lecturing their earnest students and social commentators examining the state of newspapers in America were going to stop talking about things like the responsibility of the press and the conflict between freedom of the press and a fair trial and start talking about the ladies in the lobby and the implications of the ladies being in the lobby and—more important, much more important—the results of the lady being in the lobby, and when they did, and only when they did, would they begin at last to start offering a little real insight into the newspaper business. For whatever the truth is about that business, and he had long since conceded not only that he did not know what that truth is but also that there existed in his mental or emotional makeup some defect that was probably going to be able to keep him from finding out what it is, he felt certain that it must in some way be connected with ladies in the lobby. That, he was to think later, was one reason why he was glad that this story, this particular story, had started the way it had. The other reason was that if you like everything about newspaper work—the story behind the story—tied up in a neat little package, the thing that first opens to inspection should ideally be always such a lady.
Caro reminisces a little about this scenario. “Very often, after my byline started getting known, my phone headset would ring, and the operator would say, ‘There are two ladies in the lobby who would like to see you,’” Caro says. “So you’d go out and you’d hear this story about some injustice. You realize they had turned to newspapers as the last resort of justice. And I thought that was sort of wonderful. I mean, in a way, that’s why—if you want to know why I became a reporter, that’s probably it, you know.”
As for whether the phenomenon Caro—and his narrator—observe is peculiarly gendered, his narrator later attempts to address this: “Now why can’t it be a man in the lobby, he would think. Well it can, of course, and sometimes, indeed, it is, but not usually, he had found, and maybe that in itself was part of the significance.”
When I ask Caro whether he found writing fiction frustrating or satisfying, he replies, “I don’t honestly remember.” But then he reconsiders. “I would say sort of the same,” he says. “You know, writing is writing. I mean, there is a mot juste, there is a rhythm that things should be in. If you’re going to be a writer and you want your things to last, you have to find that there is a rhythm.”
Later, as Caro steps away from our conversation for a few minutes, I leaf through other pages from the novel’s various drafts. Caro had said he remembers few of the novel’s specifics, but it appears that some of the story drew on his most famous Newsday series, “Misery Acres,” which exposed how unsuspecting East Coasters nearing retirement were sold supposedly idyllic plots of land out West that would turn out to be nothing but vacant lots in the middle of scrub or desert with no facilities or amenities. One page of the draft novel, covered in Caro’s handwritten revisions and corrections, features a woman named Mrs. Sanders—clearly a lady in the lobby—showing the narrator a newspaper advertisement with a golf green, a lake, a motorboat, a girl waterskiing, a building identified as a “community center,” all near a four-lane highway with snow-tipped mountains in the distance. “There’s nothing there,” she tells him.
Another page—this one stained and ripped—from a different draft, arrives at a spot where it seems the narrator has just completed a visit out West to one of these nothing-there places and is reflecting on the experience.
And he managed to fly all the way home without letting himself think once about what it meant that so much of America—not only out west, though that was incredible; leaving Vegas, they flew for what seemed like an hour over a barren desert landscape, broken, from 30,000 feet, only by the Grand Canyon; but even in the east: they had to hold at Kennedy and the pattern took them to the northwest, and beyond the limits of the city’s suburbs, what everyone called “upstate” seemed to stretch endlessly away, with only scattered houses—about what it meant that so much of America was empty land.
Caro says he can recall no great reason why his novel was never published. “I had to go down to Texas,” he says, referring to a multiyear reporting trip for his first Johnson book. “And somehow it faded away. I honestly don’t remember.” He mentions that at one point, when he needed more money for the Johnson project, he shared a draft of the novel with his famed editor Robert Gottlieb. But the financial problem was soon solved a different way—with an unprecedented million-dollar deal from the Book-of-the-Month Club—and Caro remembers Gottlieb handing back the novel with the words, “Forget this.”
Caro suggests that he never quite knew what Gottlieb meant. He didn’t even know if Gottlieb had read the draft, and he never directly asked. “You know, the documentary softens our relationship,” Caro says, referring to the 2022 film Turn Every Page, made by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie, before Gottlieb’s death in 2023. “We didn’t have a relationship where I could have had a conversation like that.
One way or another, Caro’s novel remains unfinished and unpublished—15 folders of fragments of a tale he never finished telling, narrated by someone who at times sounds eerily familiar. A man for whom, as another passage describing the novel’s narrator puts it:
Everything was a story, to whom everything had always been a story; even as a boy, when he was watching a game or participating in it, he was always sort of thinking simultaneously about how he was going to tell his mother or his friends about it, make them see it …
The story on Caro’s mind these days is the same one he’s been fixated on for years: Lyndon B. Johnson’s. When we spoke, Caro had written nearly 1,000 pages of the fifth and final volume, with plenty further to go. That’s what he’d like to return to, right now. But first, I pull his mind back into the long-unexamined past for one moment.
Surely, I protest, Gottlieb couldn’t have not read the draft of the novel.
“The box looked unopened,” Caro says.
I try one last time, saying I can’t believe his editor would have been incurious enough not to look.
“I don’t know,” Caro says. “I’ve told you what I know.”