RON CHERNOW
Ron Chernow (born March 3, 1949) is an American writer, journalist, historian, and biographer. He has written bestselling and award-winning biographies of historical figures from the world of business, finance, and American politics. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2011 American History Book Prize for his 2010 book, Washington: A Life. He is also the recipient of the National Book Award for Nonfiction for his 1990 book, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance. His biographies of Alexander Hamilton (2004) and John D. Rockefeller (1998) were both nominated for National Book Critics Circle Awards, while the former served as the inspiration for the Hamilton musical, for which Chernow worked as a historical consultant. (More from Wikipedia)
Fresh from his success with his earlier musical In the Heights (set in the mostly Dominican-American communities in the Washington Heights section of Upper Manhattan), Lin-Manuel Miranda began reading the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Once he saw echoes of his own life there, he started envisioning the idea of Alexander Hamilton’s story as a Broadway musical.
Lin-Manuel Miranda had expected the incredulous laughter that greeted his statement, and it continued during his performance of a rough-cut number from the future musical Hamilton, though there was enthusiastic applause at the end. On its face, the idea is absurd: The early days of our nation and the birth of hip hop are separated by two full centuries. But Miranda has connected the dots: Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant to this country who was born in the West Indies and orphaned at a young age. Hamilton did not so much speak sentences as he did paragraphs; the rapid-fire singing in hip hop was ideal for getting those dense passages out to an audience. And as related in Wikipedia, the following story about Hamilton’s use of his writing to get him out of a miserable life is in precisely the same spirit as impoverished African-Americans who try to rap their way out of the ghetto:
“[Alexander] Hamilton wrote an essay published in the Royal Danish-American Gazette, a detailed account of a hurricane which had devastated Christiansted [now in the U. S. Virgin Islands] on August 30, 1772. His biographer [Ron Chernow] says that, ‘Hamilton’s famous letter about the storm astounds the reader for two reasons: For all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous the 17-year-old self-educated clerk could write with such verve and gusto. Clearly, Hamilton was highly literate and already had considerable fund of verbal riches.’ The essay impressed community leaders, who collected a fund to send the young Hamilton to the North American colonies for his education.”
(September 2016)
