The long lives of others. The feat of Robert Caro, biographer of power in America

In a digital and hectic age, the elderly journalist hasn’t given up on the method of incessant verification of every detail. He has been writing about Lyndon B. Johnson since ’74, who knows if it will come to an end

Does it take longer to live a life or tell it? It depends on the biographer. If it is Robert Caro, one of America’s most famous journalists, the inventor of a method of biographical storytelling unique in the world, then it takes most of life to tell another. Take the case of Lyndon B. Johnson, or LBJ as Americans offhandedly call him. He was the thirty-sixth president of the United States and lived 65 years, 37 of which in political activity. Caro, already a Pulitzer Prize winner at the time, began work on the biography of the former president in 1974, a year after his death. Nearly fifty years later, he still isn’t done. He has published four of the planned five volumes of LBJ’s monumental account of existence (winning a second Pulitzer), he has been working on the last one for eleven years and it is unknown when he will complete it. If he will complete it. Because not only is there the problem of the years that go by – Robert Caro is now eighty-seven – but also of traveling companions who disappear.