Review: A new biography of Lin-Manuel Miranda tells his creative origin story

Every performer has one: the story of how they got hooked on the endorphin rush of applause. For Lin-Manuel Miranda, the prolific writer-performer who’s given us “In the Heights,” “Hamilton” and “Encanto,” it came when he was 6 and played “Camptown Races” at his first piano recital. Pleasantly shocked by the audience response, he exclaimed, “I know another one!” According to Miranda family lore, smilingly reported by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner in his engaging new biography, Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist, young Lin-Manuel got through no fewer than four piano pieces before his piano teacher finally yanked him offstage. “I realized cool things could happen if I kept at this,” Pollack-Pelzner quotes him as saying.

Unlike many budding performers, though, Miranda had no shortage of encouragement in his pursuits even when he wasn’t onstage, first from his parents, then from teachers, friends and mentors, and eventually from producers and professionals. Indeed, the lyric that kept popping into my head as I ploughed through Pollack-Pelzner’s involving narrative—this is the rare book where you are likely to be singing along as you read—was a line from early in “Hamilton,” when the young upstart is chatting excitedly over drinks with his new compatriots and one of them shouts, “Let’s get this guy in front of a crowd!” 

From the start, Miranda was the kind of kid who positively thrived in the public eye, even before he had demonstrable talent or chops. In the book’s telling, his life so far has been a series of triumphs on ever bigger stages, from school plays to big-budget movies, with an avid cheering section that swelled from family and friends to much of the world.

It’s a credit to Pollack-Pelzner that this continuous upward ascent does not cloy as much as it might. That’s partly because, as Pollack-Pelzner’s subtitle is at pains to suggest, Miranda’s path was hardly inevitable or solitary. Complicating the myth of the singular artistic genius, the author sets out to trace the threads of collaboration with which Miranda sewed together his craft—the villages that raised him and his work. This focus leads the book through the lessons Miranda took from the school musicals he appeared in, directed and wrote at Hunter College High School and at Wesleyan University, where an early version of “In the Heights” was born.

And it makes room for a lot of the vivid personal details that shaped Miranda’s sensibility. He was raised in Inwood, a mixed-income neighborhood in northern Manhattan, by two hard-working parents, Luis Miranda, a political strategist, and Luz Towns-Miranda, a child psychologist, both of whom instilled in young Lin-Manuel a love for Broadway musicals as well as Latin music. Likewise, Miranda absorbed not only the pop culture of the 1980s and ’90s, from hip-hop to video games, but the era’s musical theater milestones as well, from “Les Misérables” to “Rent.” Crucially, it was a time when these were becoming distinctions without a difference—when pop and rock music were increasingly the sound of Broadway, and animated Disney musicals were in every family’s VHS player.

The book’s emphasis on collaboration also stresses the centrality of the crew he gathered along the way. Among them are director Tommy Kail, musical arrangers Alex Lacamoire and Bill Sherman, the cast of the rap improv troupe Freestyle Love Supreme, which included Christopher Jackson (“Hamilton’s” original George Washington), and “In the Heights” book writer Quiara Alegría Hudes. These are all folks who are said to cherish the group effort as much as the individual voice and who live by the mantra “the best idea wins, no matter where it comes from.”

It’s a convincing story, and no one believes or repeats it more than Miranda himself. But an emphasis on the shared creative spark also leads the book head-on into its gnarliest collision, rendered with admirable clarity by Pollack-Pelzner: the seven-month period in late 2015 and early 2016 when, just as “Hamilton” opened on Broadway and began its runaway ascent into the cultural canon, most of the original cast was embroiled in a painful dispute with the show’s producer, Jeffrey Seller, for a piece of the show’s profits, citing the “collective emotional intelligence” they had been encouraged to feel a part of.

Though the dispute was finally resolved when Seller agreed to grant a 1 percent stake in profits to the show’s original actors, this contretemps was not merely about show business politics. As Leslie Odom Jr., who played Aaron Burr, tells Pollack-Pelzner, “We all felt the historic success of the show meant that it had some responsibilities, by virtue of the fact that the megaphone was so large, and by virtue of the bodies on which this story was told.”

It was, of course, one of the signature moves of “Hamilton” that it cast Black and Latino performers in the roles of the nation’s founders and told this familiar story in pop and hip-hop idioms. But was this a case of the American story being reclaimed and reframed by folks who had been excluded from its founding, or was it an idealistic liberal gloss on that founding? Pollack-Pelzner rightly roots this debate in the Obama era, when it seemed that the answer to the question of American identity was an optimistic “yes, and” rather than either/or. This was a time when Chris Jackson, a Black man playing the nation’s slave-owning first president, could serenade the nation’s first Black president in the White House with the “Hamilton” ballad “One Last Time.”

As we know too well by now, that multicultural vision soon gave way to the culture war divisions of the Trump era, which began with “Hamilton” actors imploring newly elected Vice President Mike Pence from the Broadway stage to “uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us” and has more recently seen “Hamilton” cancelling a planned run at the Kennedy Center, now under the thumb of President Trump. An ethos of cooperation, onstage or anywhere, has been replaced by a zero-sum transactionalism: You got yours, I got mine.

As if anticipating an era of tribal warfare, Miranda’s latest effort is a concept album, co-written with Eisa Davis, based on the 1979 gangland film “The Warriors,” which may or may not become a stage show one day. 

Whatever you think of Lin-Manuel Miranda (I’m positively disposed, with reservations), he is nothing if not a kind of zeitgeist magnet: a man who met his wife via Facebook when the site was brand new, who staged a pop-punk jukebox musical (“Basketcase,” after the Green Day song) in college before that form became ubiquitous on Broadway, who once made Twitter a sounding board and virtual scrapbook and whose live-capture film of “Hamilton” essentially inaugurated Disney+. Aside from Pollack-Pelzner’s model of the master collaborator, this is another way to think of Miranda’s genius: as an antenna uniquely attuned to the moment, including but not limited to its musical frequencies.

This article appears in November 2025.

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