Caro in Texas

So now I'm reading the first volume of Robert Caro's magnum opus on LBJ, The Path to Power.  And it has all the great qualities of his bio of Robert Moses, the same exhaustive attention to detail combined with the grand sweep of history, except for the fact that it's not on Caro's home turf.  Caro, born of the West Side, schooled at Horace Mann and then Princeton, writes of the frontier life of hill country Texas, and it's hard not to detect a note of grand mythification, of the exotic other.  I have already compared Caro to Whitman for their shared revelry in the sheer mass and breadth of America, but they view it from the perspective of The Empire State.

Judging from his Wikipedia bio, for instance, Whitman doesn't seem to have traveled broadly, seeming to have ranged no further than the DC area during the Civil War.  Caro, surely, has spent much time on site in Texas working on primary sources. Or at least his wife Ina -- his sole research assistant -- has.

But what drew him there in the first place?  It would seem he is driven by his man, whom he follows to the end of the earth.



In other news, I need to diversify away from reading books by white guys.  I mean, I know I am one, and we do write many great books, but other people do too.