Robert Caro
1935-
Birthplace: New York City
Typewriter: Smith Corona Electra 210

As a journalist for Newsday, the Long Island, New York daily, in the early 1960s, Robert A. Caro became "interested in how power works." Out of that interest have come two panoramic political sagas, each seven years in the writing and both bestsellers. The first was The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974), a biography of the unelected "master builder" who made himself the most powerful figure in the City and State of New York in our time. That work won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize for the book "Which best represents the union of the historian and the artist." The second was The Path to Power (1982), the first volume in a projected trilogy about the thirty-sixth president of the United States, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The book also won the National Book Critics Circle Award as the best nonfiction work of 1982. In 2003, Caro received Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Master of the Senate" (Alfred A. Knopf).

Trivia:

Mr. Caro’s favorite typewriter is a Smith Corona Electra 210, the model on which he composed The Power Broker. He bought seventeen Electra 210s when the company quit making them decades ago.