I always try to find objects and documents that have something about them that are unusual,

that will kind of say to people, look at me.

You know, if you look at a document with a lot of text, it may not become visually compelling,

but if there's a big red line through the middle of it, that looks like something you might

want to learn more about.

Hello, and welcome back to Working, I'm your host, Karen Hahn.

And I'm your other host, June Thomas.

June, who is our working subject this week?

So this week I spoke with Deborah Schmidtbach, who is a curator at the New York Historical

Society, and I reached out to her when I saw that the museum had mounted an exhibition

called From Robert Carrows Archive.

It struck me as interesting that a writer's working papers would be something that people

would be interested in paying to look at, that I have to admit that I was definitely

making plans to visit the minute, the very second I heard about it.

That sounds so cool, but also like terrifying as someone who I feel like I would never want

anyone to look at my notes.

I feel like those are, I will burn them before I let someone look at them.

Say it, but for any listeners who might not be familiar with his work, I was wondering

if you could explain who Robert Carrows is and what to you makes him such an icon.

Oh, so he's a biographer.

He wrote The Power Broker, a very, very, very big, completely absorbing biography of Robert

Moses, the man who reshaped New York City in his own very flawed image.

...