‘HAMILTON’ WASN’T AN A-PLUS MUSICAL AT FIRST

A NEW BIOGRAPHY FROM DANIEL POLLACK-PELZNER TRACES THE ASCENT OF THE EAGER-TO-LEARN LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA

- BY JULIA M. KLEIN

FOR A HIGH SCHOOL assignment, Lin-Manuel Miranda tried to make a film about the 1804 duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. While he and his girlfriend were scouting locations, a thief grabbed their video camera. Miranda couldn't afford a replacement, and his social studies teacher, unimpressed with the script he submitted, awarded him a B-minus.¢ What must that teacher be thinking now?

The 10th anniversary of Miranda’s Tony Award-winning, culturally transformative musical “Hamilton,” with the duel as its centerpiece, has occasioned a new wave of critical hosannas. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s affectionate biography provides an illuminating look at Miranda’s creative development and influences, as well as a detailed account of how his greatest achievement (and other projects) coalesced.

“Lin-Manuel Miranda” benefits from Miranda’s extensive cooperation and more than 150 interviews with his family, friends, mentors and collaborators. The biography depicts a joyous, charismatic, well-meaning, occasionally imperfect man and artist who loves the limelight and manages to absorb useful lessons from nearly everything he hears, reads and sees. Imbued with “a burning desire to create art and a limitless curiosity about ways to do it better,” Miranda learned from a rapping bus driver, a high school girlfriend with a gift for directing and musical artists as diverse as Stephen Sondheim, Gilbert and Sullivan, Rubén Blades, Jonathan Larson, Jay-Z and Eminem.

As suggested by its subtitle, “The Education of an Artist,” the book is the nonfiction equivalent of a