Shamefully Late To The Party: Alexander Hamilton
If there’s one skill I’ve yet to gain, it is the ability to see and recognize greatness before anyone else. For example, if I were a teenager in the heady summer of 1963, I would probably would not get the fuss about these four mop-headed boys called ‘The Beatles. My respect for them, half a century after they stopped making music, stems in part from the reverence with which history speaks of them. ‘Getting it’ became frightfully easy with the eye of history steering my way. I’m sure even now I’m surrounded by art and culture that my grandchildren will venerate and chastise me for not having seen the brilliance of in that moment.
I can say this with some authority with regards to the subject of this review, a book that I am shamefully late to reviewing because I knew of its awesome impact for years yet still could not get around to it until now.
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.
We’ll get to the item in the foreground.
Background
My first encounter with Ron Chernow came in 2021. As a pandemic raged around us, I had plenty of time and much to ponder. Living under virtual house arrest in Bristol, England, Chernow’s 2010 biography of George Washington frequently cropped up in my list of recommendations. When I got it, I crushed it in short order, staggered by the way Chernow made the much-mythologized Founding Father seem so vivid and human. I went through his book on President Grant later that year.
Inevitably, as I paid more attention to the skills of Ron Chernow, another fact rested on the surface of my face: his 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton was so good, certainly up to the standards of the books I read, that it resulted in a hit Broadway show so influential that even I knew about it. I knew nothing of theatre, so this fact was little more than a curious tidbit.
Book Origins
In 1998, Chernow became interested in Alexander Hamilton. His reasoning was sound; Chernow realized that Americans, at most, knew two things about Hamilton: that he was the guy on the ten-dollar bill, and that he spectacularly perished in a duel with sitting VICE-PRESIDENT Aaron Burr. Because he was never President himself, Alexander Hamilton’s name as a founder usually stayed below the public’s mental radar. Presidents 1-5 (Washington, Adam, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe) and Benjamin Franklin were more memorable for various other reasons.
This remarkable state of American idiocy put Chernow, as a writer, in an enviable position: he was among a select few who understood Hamilton’s extraordinary significance outside the walls of the ivory tower. As such, he had an open market to write Hamilton’s story in such a way that it would forever cure Americans of their monstrous ignorance.
Six years after embarking on this noble quest, Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton was released in April 2004. The book received good sales and mostly positive reviews. Readers were reconfirmed in their belief in Chernow as a biographer of the first-class.
But as Chernow crossed over from writing about Alexander Hamilton to Hamilton’s longtime boss, President Washington, another reader found the book.
Addressing The Elephant In The Room—The Play
By now, the play’s origin story is a legend, but it’s worth repeating. In 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda needed a vacation. As the principal writer, lead actor, and musical composer for the play In The Heights, Miranda was officially a Broadway star. In The Heights won multiple Tony awards and gave Miranda great renown in the world of theatre. But performing so frequently was exhausting, and a vacation to Mexico with his girlfriend was sorely needed.
Before lazing on a Mexican beach, Miranda picked up a long book which would last him through his vacation. Praise the Lord, he chose Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton. In later interviews, Miranda said began reading and thinking about doing something based on the life of Hamilton before he went on holiday, but the vacation kicked the inspiration into overload.
In Chernow’s masterful hands, Miranda discovered one of the most interesting men in history. Particularly striking to Miranda was Hamilton’s sheer contemporary resonance. He was the first immigrant success story with eerie similarities to Miranda’s own father.
Yet it was the titanic speed and efficiency of Hamilton’s writing which really caught Miranda’s attention. Hamilton’s papers fill no fewer than twenty-seven official volumes which is staggering given that Hamilton died at forty-seven (or is it forty-nine?—imprecise early sources makes it unclear). An artful torrent of words was no stranger to Miranda, for he specialized in hip-hop and rap music. This genre shoves as many words into as funky a rhythm as humanly possible, exactly what Alexander Hamilton unwittingly did two centuries before hip-hop was invented.
Miranda returned from Mexico more determined than ever to make hip-hop music about Alexander Hamilton. The exact form this music would take was not clear at that stage. A full-blown musical was not necessarily Miranda’s first choice and a concept album seemed like a worthier goal.
But unwilling to write lyrics unworthy of the man they were about, Miranda reached out to Ron Chernow with an invite to see In The Heights. Chernow accepted and met Miranda backstage.
“So Lin,” Chernow recalled himself saying, “I hear my book made an impression on you.”
“Ron,” said Miranda, “as I was reading the book, hip-hop songs were rising off the page.”
Chernow, unsurprisingly, never heard that response before. Once Miranda confided to the biographer what he was up to, he asked if Chernow would consent to be the historical consultant.
“You mean you want me to tell you when something is wrong?” Chernow said, half in jest.
“Yes,” said Miranda earnestly. “I want the historians to take this seriously.”
Chernow agreed and Miranda set off to work while Chernow continued his Washington biography. Unlike his subject, Miranda took a year to write the opening song, which he performed at the White House in 2009 to high acclaim. Collaborators forced Miranda to speed things along.
By 2014, The Hamilton Mixtape, as it was called, was now a full-fledged musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton. For simplicity’s sake, the name was amended to Hamilton to prevent any ambiguities about the play’s subject.
Those who first saw the play discovered that the history was by-and-large accurate. Limitations of the theatre medium prevented an accuracy rate of 100% and in any case, Miranda cast Black and Hispanic actors to play many of the characters, a clear deviation from the pasty-white reality. Miranda, fittingly, played Hamilton himself.
Immediately, audiences could not stop raving about it. It became the hottest ticket on Broadway for a long, long time and rightly so.
Me Again
To my eternal shame, I’m ten years late to this party. I did not see Hamilton until June of 2025, when I caught the West-End production in London. That it was one of the best works of art I’ve ever consumed goes without saying. Not since Shakespeare’s history plays has the theatre genre done justice to someone’s story. I picked up the biography the next day and got to work for this review.
What struck me on reading was how Miranda’s inspiration came not from becoming an amateur Hamilton scholar, but by reading this particular version of Hamilton’s life. Chernow’s work, sublime as when I last encountered him, joined the dots of Alexander Hamilton’s life together in a very particular way which were rendered so perfectly in musical verse.
Furthermore, Miranda’s decision to ‘have the historians take this seriously’ was extremely consequential, seriously being the operative word. Today’s culture is about the unserious: satire, postmodern eye-winks to the audience, plays and movies that deconstruct themselves mid-way through, constantly breaking the fourth wall, etc. Audiences are yearning for serious art, yet get precious few examples of it.
Both the play and the book are some of the finest tributes to getting the story right. May I never be late to such a significant cultural party again.
Final Thoughts
In the long-gone TV show Classic Albums, Rolling Stone magazine critic David Fricke had this to say about Nirvana’s seminal album Nevermind: “it didn’t sound like history, it didn’t sound like the future, it just sounded amazing.”
Alexander Hamilton, both the book and the play, are not a throwbacks to some mythic history of great biography, nor are they the future of where the genre will go.
They’re just amazing.