America’s biographer
A chat with Ron Chernow, winner of 2018 Tribune Literary Award
The great thing about writing hefty, potent and mostly admiring biographies of dead presidents of these United States is that the living holders of the office take a particular interest. This goes a long way toward explaining why Ron Chernow, the 69-year-old, Pulitzer Prizewinning winner of the 2018 Tribune Literary Award, might aptly be described not just as America’s happiest historian, but arguably as its most influential. Chernow, who will receive the Tribune award on Oct. 27 at Symphony Center, may be the most popular historian among his fellow citizens too.
In 2015, President Barack Obama let it be known that he was taking Chernow’s “Washington: A Life” along to his family vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. Obama already knew Chernow’s work well: When a young Broadway writer-performer named Lin-Manuel Miranda had picked up a copy of Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton” biography right before a Mexican vacation in 2008, thus changing the trajectory of the American musical theater, the first songs to come out of Miranda’s skull were performed in front of Obama at a White House Poetry
For a visitor to Chernow’s neat and modest townhouse in Brooklyn Heights, Clinton’s telling conditional clause seemed like an excellent excuse to ask an eminent historian if he did, in fact, believe that we all were still interested in forming a more perfect union.
Chernow, sipping sparking water at the his kitchen table, thought for a while before he spoke. A worker’s jackhammer was pounding away into the street outside his door.
“I feel like we’re always striving for a more perfect union,” he says. “People on both sides feel like they are fighting for the soul of America. And thus it has always been. There is always a gap between our ideals and our reality.”
From there, Chernow, at once careful and loquacious, talks about how he views the current rhetorical moment as “extreme and worrisome,” and even that he feels it shows some of the danger signs that have led to physical violence in past moments of American history. But, he insists, America has most certainly gone through worse. Between the 1850s and 1870s, he says, “America was completely torn apart, creating wounds that have not yet healed. Historians have kept revising upwards the number of people who died in the Civil War. It’s now 750,000.”
And that number, he says, did not take into account the number of people maimed during those years of horror by their fellow American: Prosthetic limbs, Chernow observes, became a significant budget line-item.
The main difference between then and now, he says, is that the tumultuous 19thcentury conflict revolved around “one big irreconcilable difference” that offered “no middle ground,” whereas the current schisms “don’t boil down to one issue.”
He’s clearly used to being asked to apply his work to the modern moment.
“You know,” he says, “you write a book and you don’t know the atmosphere in which a book will emerge. You can start writing it in one atmosphere, and it comes out in another. Honesty, patriotism, modesty. These are in short supply at the present.”
In Chernow’s mind, Grant was a living example of those qualities. Grant did not, for example, want to write his memoirs, considering such an act of self-promotion incompatible with his history as a military man. He only did so after he found himself bedridden, dying from cancer, and impecunious. To write was the only way Grant felt he could provide for his family. “He still produced 336,000 splendid words in the span of a year,” Chernow wrote in “Grant.”
Chernow knows something about prodigious output: Chernow’s biography of Grant is about the same length as his subject’s memoirs. He is nothing if not thorough.
Clearly, the historian has embraced the sweetness of his uncommon celebrity. He has numerous stories about the famous people who came backstage in his presence at “Hamilton.” He clearly got a kick out of meeting Jack Lew, the former secretary of the U.S. Treasury who first said he would kick the face of Alexander Hamilton off the ten-spot, only to reverse course after “Hamilton” revealed to Americans the historical weight and import of its subject. Chernow likes to talk of being approached by young people, fascinated that he wrote the book upon which their favorite musical was based.
“If you write, as I do, history and biography for a living, the history and biography audience tends to skew older,” he said. “So very often when I would go and give a speech, the audience would be 40, 50 and up. Whereas now ….”
Chernow is about to say that his audience is now much more youthful, thanks to “Hamilton.” But his visitor interrupts: “Why is that? Do we not give a damn about history and biography when you are young?”
“That’s a very good question. My theory is that as you get older, your own life becomes history. You know, you feel yourself a part of history. The things that happened to you when you were in high school or college suddenly fade into history with people writing books about it …. You’re becoming a historical
2018 Chicago Tribune Literary Award
On Saturday, Ron Chernow will accept the 2018 Tribune Literary Award and appear in conversation with Tribune publisher and editor-in-chief Bruce Dold. The event will be at 11 a.m. at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; more at www.chicagohumanities.org.
figure. You have history in yourself,” Chernow said. “But I’ve given, just in the last two weeks, two speeches where an enormous number of teenagers and children came. This is altogether new and delightful for me.”
A new market for American history
Chernow is now a wealthy man. He is not just the author of the source material for “Hamilton” but also the show’s “historical consultant,” an enchanting consequence, he says, of Miranda wanting historians to take his artistic work seriously. As a result, Chernow reportedly gets 1 percent of the show’s adjusted grosses, likely netting him a seven-figure annual income from all the various productions across the country and in London. It is an income stream that shows no signs of any pending abatement.
But he seems unfazed by wealth — even though he also has seen “Grant” get optioned for a future Steven Spielberg movie, possibly with Leonardo DeCaprio in the leading role. He feels no need to live wildly.
“Maybe I am a simple soul,” he says, but all of my needs were being fulfilled before ‘Hamilton.” I have eaten breakfast at this same kitchen table for 11 years.”
You could argue, of course, that Chernow actually created his own market. In concert with Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay for Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” Chernow’s success has made it safe for Hollywood and Broadway producers to pay attention to American history, dead presidents previously having been though of as box-office poison in all media.
Not anymore.