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The prizewinning, best-selling biographer Robert A. Caro works in a monastic room 22 floors above midtown Manhattan, yet even its spartan trappings are a bit lavish for him. "I wish it was smaller," Caro says. "My office on Long Island, which I really like, is 8 by 12. It's a shed out behind my house." He showed us around the place just before Master of the Senate (Knopf, $35), the 1,100-page third volume of his Lyndon Johnson bio, hit stores. --TP
THE FILE CABINETS bulge with transcripts of interviews conducted by the writer and his only researcher--his wife. He explains, "You simply start at one end of the file cabinets and go through them, numbering when you come to a quote you want to use. You go to some files and they have no numbers in them, which means I basically wasted months of my life." THE DESKS bear the tools of composition--stacks of white legal paper and a Smith Corona typewriter. "My friends tell me most publishing contracts contain a clause saying that you have to hand it in on a disc. No one's ever mentioned that to me." THE CORKBOARD is still tacked over with an outline of the last chapter he revised--as well as a yellowed page of notes for his first chapter and a photo of the Senate chamber. THE DESK LAMP, because it features a small sculpture of a charging chariot, might count as the only thing here that's not purely functional, but even it has its uses. When Caro was reworking a chapter on Johnson's determination to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act, he taped a note to it: "'Is there desperation on this page?'... I wanted the rhythms of the sentences to reflect desperation." DRESS CODE He commutes in coat and tie. "I...try to remind myself that I'm working."
