Serious Nonfiction in the Digital Age

This is a subject that’s been on my mind a lot these past few weeks, driven largely by the absolutely deserved attention cycle given to Robert Caro’s LBJ biography and volume 4, THE PASSAGE OF POWER. It’s not just that Caro is a throwback, someone whose career was the product of a time when publishing took risks, didn’t really care about P&L statements, and were only starting to be chained to the yoke of multi-conglomerate expectations, but that it’s impossible to imagine a next-generation version of him carrying on with multi-volume biography.