I was surprised to realize how much historical characters are quoted verbatim in the musical: the fourteen-year-old Hamilton wrote“ I wish there was a war” after British landed at Kip’s Bay Washington exclaimed, “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?”… etc. And fans of the musical will find numerous treasures here. I will happily admit that I had never heard of this particular founding father till he was made famous again by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Hamilton’s biography was of interest to me only because of its adaptation into musical form. A biography is basically a narrated story of human life in all its effervescent nature. It makes one consider these inevitabilities of human life – regardless of the events, inspiring or incriminating, that happen in the middle. There’s something peculiar about biography as a genre – it takes the span of a single human life as its arc: most biographies begin with a birth and end with a death. This is the first biography of that kind of length that I’ve ever read, however, and it wasn’t as slow-paced as I had feared. I also struggled a bit with the descriptions of Hamilton’s financial system – but I think that’s my fault rather than the biographer’s as I can’t pretend my understanding of economics is particularly good.

I’m not going to pretend this was a very easy feat for me – the first few hundred pages were quite uphill, perhaps because the stories about Hamilton’s distant relatives were not quite as interesting as the author seemed to think them. I did it! I finished reading Ron Chernow’s massive biography of Alexander Hamilton with 4 more days to spare before I go to see the musical.

Ron chernow hamilton