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.
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