"According to Caro’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, no book receives more inquiries about its completion than the last Johnson volume..."

"... even though anyone with a long memory, a love for history or access to Wikipedia knows how his life turns out. The escalation of the Vietnam War, and the failure to win in it or reach a negotiated settlement, drove Johnson to announce in March 1968 that he would not seek re-election. He lived just four years after leaving the White House, dying of a heart attack in January 1973, at age 64. 'As great as his (Caro’s) earlier books have been, this is the culmination, the one many of us have been waiting for,' [said] the journalist-historian David Maraniss.... 'Everything that came before leads to these years, all of LBJ’s work and all of Caro’s amazing reconstruction and assessment, when the world explodes at home and overseas and Johnson struggles with his powers, his beliefs, and his soul.'"

From "Robert Caro writes, and waits, during the COVID-19 outbreak" (AP). Robert A. Caro is 84, and so many of us are counting on him to finish the last volume. If I had to name one old person in the world whose continuing to live is most important to me, it would be him. With or without the threat of coronavirus, I was thinking about him. He has a specific and huge task to finish. The last volume is the part of history that I remember enduring, that shaped my young life and my attitude toward my country. As the AP writer puts it, we all know generally what happened in those years, but that's so much less than what we will know when at long last we have Robert A. Caro's last volume.

So how is Robert A. Caro doing? He's in the hot spot, New York City. We're told he "rises early, walks to his office down the street, spends hours on the fifth and final volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography and enjoys a late-day stroll in Central Park with his wife, Ina, both of them wearing protective masks." We're told that he "jokes that he has a long history, like many writers, of social distancing." The Caros have "one of their children [to] bring them groceries." (Strange the way we use the word "children" to refer to adults.) The inability to travel is having some effect: "The historian had been hoping to visit Vietnam in March as part of his research for his Johnson book... [and h]e needs to [look] through some papers in the Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas," but he can put them off. He's "immersed in one section of the last Johnson volume, set during 1967" that "is as long as many books."

Such a long writing project! It's been going on since the mid-1970s, since he was 40. Such a brilliant achievement. I do wish him well.

ADDED: I wrote "If I had to name one old person in the world whose continuing to live is most important to me, it would be him." I should have written something like "If I had to name one old person in the world outside of my personal circle...." I myself am an "old person in the world"!