in the early 1960s, Caro wrote a long series about why a proposed bridge across Long Island Sound from Rye to Oyster Bay, championed by Moses, would have been inadvisable. It would have required piers so large as to disrupt tidal flows in the sound, among other problems. Caro believed that his work had influenced even the state's powerful governor Nelson Rockefeller to reconsider the idea, until he saw the state's Assembly vote overwhelmingly to pass a preliminary measure for the bridge. "That was one of the transformational moments of my life," Caro said years later. It led him to think about Moses for the first time. "I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: 'Everything you've been doing is baloney. You've been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here's a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don't have the slightest idea how he got it.'" In 1966, his wife Ina Caro changed the topic of her graduate thesis to write about the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, while Caro was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University taking courses in urban planning and land use. He found that academics' notions of highway planning contrasted with what he had seen as a reporter. "Here were these mathematical formulas about traffic density and population density and so on," he recalled, "and all of a sudden I said to myself: 'This is completely wrong. This isn't why highways get built. Highways get built because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you don't find out and explain to people where Robert Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is going to be dishonest.'" He found that despite Moses' illustrious career, no biography had been written, save the highly propagandistic Builder for Democracy in 1952. So he decided to undertake the task himself, beginning the seven-year process of hundreds of interviews meticulously documented as well as extensive original archival research, listed in the notes on sources in an appendix. Originally, Caro believed it would take nine months to research and write the book. As that time stretched into years, he ran out of money and despaired of ever finishing it. Ina, his wife and research assistant, sold the family home on Long Island