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Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, "Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
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Eric LeMay
Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I speak with Daniel Pollock Pelzner, author of the new artist's biography, Lin Manuel Miranda, the Education of an Artist. The book was recently named one of NPR's Books We Loved for 2025. Pollock Pelzner is a cultural historian, theater critic, and teacher at Portland State University whose writing has appear in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the New York Times. Pollock Pelzner's biography offers a captivating exploration of Miranda's artistic journey. From a sensitive child in Manhattan's Washington Heights to the visionary creator of Hamilton, whose voice has reshaped musical theater and popular culture. This book captures a living artist in motion, weaving together countless threads of collaboration, cultural synthesis, and personal revelation that define Miranda's work. In our conversation, we focus on the challenge of writing biography itself. How does a scholar and a critic approach the story of someone whose art feels both deeply personal and expansively historical? How does one trace the education of an artist who learned not in isolation, but through community, heritage, and creative exchange? Pollock Pelsner guides us through these questions with the grace of a storyteller and the precision of a historian, drawing on unparalleled access to Miranda's inner circle and his own interviews with the artist. This is a book about how an artist finds his voice and a conversation about how a biographer finds the shape of a life. Join me for this engaging discussion with the delightful Daniel Pollock Pelzner. Daniel Pollock Pelsner, welcome to the New Books Network.
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Daniel Pollock Pelzner
Eric. Thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure.
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Eric LeMay
I am delighted to have you here and I am looking very forward to. And I'm wondering if we could. We could kind of go into it by you talking about the origins of the project. And so I'm even waiting to talk about the title because I know you had a working title before you got to your final title.
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Daniel Pollock Pelzner
That's true. You know the lore.
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Eric LeMay
Exactly. And so I'm curious about, you know, the. The origins of the project. And so if you could take us back to the moment, you know, where, where the spark occurred for you that, that this might be something that you want to do. I think our readers would be interested in hearing, like, where does a book come from? Because your book is interested in where do works of art come from.
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Daniel Pollock Pelzner
That's true. Yes. This book had a very specific inception moment. It came from a phone call. It came from. And it's circumstances that might be slightly difficult for some of your readers to replicate, but not impossible, which is, first you have to be fired, and then you have to file a lawsuit against your former employer. And then you have to have one of your mentors call you up on the telephone and tell you that litigation is a nightmare. And what you need to do is write a book to take your mind off of document review. And you need in particular this mentor to tell you that nobody cares about your mutual subject, Shakespeare anymore and that what people would really like is a book about the sky Lin Manuel Miranda, that you've been professionally stalking around the globe for the last decade or so. And the minute your mentor says this, you go from thinking that you would never want to write a book in your life and that in fact the only thing worse than being in litigation would be facing the blank page of Microsoft Word to thinking, actually, yeah, that would be a good idea.
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Eric LeMay
There was a stalking moment perhaps before a set of unusual circumstances triggered it. This person you've been talking about. Hello. Yes. Um, no, I don't think, I don't think any of our young aspiring writers are going to be able to recreate those circumstances.
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Daniel Pollock Pelzner
It's something to aspire to, but might take a little while for it all to line up perfectly. But you're right, Lin Manuel was a little bit, I think, over determined is the word my grad school professors used to. Used to use. So I think you and I, Eric, are both early modern Renaissance literature folks by training. I had, I'd been teaching Shakespeare for a couple of years in Oregon, my home state, and taking groups to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which turned out didn't just put on Shakespeare plays, but also was starting to commission a lot of current playwrights to try to create a new canon of American plays, kind of on the model of Shakespeare's history plays in particular. And that got me kind of interested in thinking, like, who are our Shakespeares today who are writing new dramatic works on a national scale that might help us reimagine who we are as a people? And so through the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I started writing about current playwrights and interviewing them. And it was such a thrill. I mean, I don't know if you've experienced this too, Eric, when you go from imagining conversations with writers who've been dead for 400 years and it's sort of one sided. But from Stephen Greenblatt on, we have all had a desire to speak with the dead, to actually calling up writers and having them respond, respond to you and answer your questions and tell you how they came to write their, their works. It was, it was quite intoxicating. So I'd written about Lynn Nottage and Kiara Alegria Hudes, Paula Vogel, some other contemporary playwrights, some of your, some of your listeners might have encountered in New York or D.C. or or around the country in their productions. And I think that was when somebody told me that if I was really interested in Shakespeare style new plays, that there was this guy, Lin Manuel Miranda, who had written a hip hop musical about the American Revolution and was sort of trying to do for early American history, what Shakespeare had done with his plays. And so we went to see the show, my wife and I, in previews In New York 2015, a decade ago, when it was just opening. And as it happened the night we were there then, Vice President Joe Biden happened to be sitting down the row from us, which was kind of. It's kind of both thrilling and annoying. It gave the evening a whole sense of importance and it meant that nobody else could use the bathroom at intermission because the Secret service had shut the whole place down. But watching this, like, succession of, you know, American presidents and vice presidents rapping on stage with the current vice president down the row, for me felt like as close as I could get to seeing Henry V next to Queen Elizabeth in 1599. It's like the performance of, you know, the origins of American power for current elected representatives. And I thought, well, I missed the first 400 years of Shakespeare reception history, but maybe I can get in on the ground level for Hamilton reception history. And so I did indeed start following the show a little bit around the world. I went to London when it opened for for Shadow of Buckingham palace in the West End to find out what happened when the American Revolution went back to the. The seat of the former British Empire. And then to Puerto Rico in 2019 after Hurricane Maria, when Manuel returned to the title role there to try to raise money for his parents island after the hurricane's devastation turned out to be a far more complicated story than I had imagined because of legacies of American colonial politics. And so I just kind of got interested in how the show kept accruing different resonance in these different environments. The way that, you know, Henry 5th met something very different for Laurence Olivier on the eve of World War II than it did for Kenneth Branagh coming out of Vietnam in the Falklands in the. In the 80s. So I had spent a while. Yeah, I think. I think probably the professional term is stalking Lin Manuel before the, the inciting incident occurred.
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Eric LeMay
That's. That's absolutely wonderful. I don't think I've giggled through somebody reprising reception history ever. So thank you for that experience. And the result is this tremendously readable and rich and funny portrait that I think is high spirited. I think any fan of Lin Manuel would be able to dive into it and hear you talking about it in the terms that you just laid out. It makes me wonder, is there another version of this book that might have been for your fellow scholars? That's a shadow of it. Were you able to say everything in the mode that you wanted, in the mode that you wrote, that you wanted.
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Daniel Pollock Pelzner
To say, ooh, what a perceptive question, Eric. And I love the way that you're describing the book that says just the terms that I would hope a reader would encounter in it. No, I had no scholarly ambitions for this book. This, this really was. This really, really. It was a book that I wrote for my students. I. Because I was feeling, after being fired, I was feeling kind of bereft and that I didn't have a classroom anymore and I didn't have a connection to all these students that I've had. And I'm sure you have many like this who want to have creative lives, want to have lives in the arts and don't know what the path might be to pursue it, because it's not like going to med school at law school. And often were first generation college students or children of immigrants who were trying to honor their family's background while also navigating the demands of, you know, entertainment industries, university environments that, that sometimes were not hospitable to their full identities. And I thought what I. What had really struck me when I talked with Lin Manuel at, you know, press conferences or other interview times was that he always credited his teachers with helping him develop his artistry to the point that, like his fans know the name of his elementary school music teacher, Barbara Ames, who cast him as Conrad Birdie, the Elvis rocker in their sixth grade play, and told all the other kids to faint every time he started to sing. And got him totally hooked on the kind of intoxicating adulation of performance. And that he, when people would ask him what he wanted to do after the global success of Hamilton, he always said he wanted to pick projects based on what he could learn from the collaborators that he might get to work with, what he could learn about making a movie musical from working with Rob Marshall on Mary Poppins Returns, or what he could learn about songwriting craft and joke structure from helping to write the score for Bring It On, a cheerleader musical. And I thought that was just a great way of moving through the world that could be, you know, not a, not a blueprint for my students, but a kind of mindset that I wanted to illuminate. And somebody had given, a family friend had given me and my wife a. A beautiful serving platter for our wedding that had calligraphed on it a phrase from a Jewish wisdom tradition, Pirkei Avot, that said, who is wise? The one who learns from everyone. And I thought, oh, that's the, that. That's the epigraph. That's the, that's the argument of the book without the, the, the hollow grease stains on, on top of it, basically. And so I wanted to, I wanted to write a book that would model that way of moving through the world. And then my actual, my excitement was trying to write it in as readable a way as I could. I've been teaching a class on coming of age stories as a, like a first year inquiry course at my university for a while where we'd read a lot of memoirs and novels and kind of buildings, Romans and then students would write their own coming of age story using the techniques we'd encountered to apply to their own trajectory at the end of the class. And I thought, okay, this is my final project. What have I learned from Maxine Hong Kingston and Rayna Grande and Sherman Alexie and Charles Dickens and Chiara Alegre Hudes that I could use to try to make this a kind of non fiction, you know, coming 90s ya coming of age novel that my students would want to read. And so then occasionally my editor would say like, you know, I don't know, 7, 8 time or internal rhyme or assonance. There would some slight, slightly specified poetic term that we had to break down. But my beta readers for this were mostly my in laws and my aunt Jude, my dear aunt Jude who lives in Oakland and mostly reads romance novels. And so I thought if it wouldn't interest them, then it wasn't going to go in the book.
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Eric LeMay
Oh, that's wonderful. That's wonderful. I was reading this while teaching a workshop full of young aspiring artists. And so I had this kind of. I was constantly pulling from what you were writing. I have another antidote. I have another antidote. Yeah, here we go. It's wonderful. And I think what you capture so well about Miranda is his ability to just pull from all of these different sources. It seems that a metaphor that continually comes up in the people you interview is that he's this sponge. And so I'm struck by the, the fact that there's this shadow structure of the, the young adult coming of age novel that's behind your book and all of these, these writers that you pulled into it. One of the things that happens again and again in your book is you give us a sense of the influences that he pulls together for a given song or even a given moment or a given triple rhy. You give us the histories. Did you find your own creative process was at that level of awareness of, you know, this is going to be a Sherman Alexei moment.
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Daniel Pollock Pelzner
Yeah. Oh, I love that. Quite. Nobody's ever asked me that. Eric and I. And absolutely there were. When. And sometimes, you know, as often it wasn't conscious. And it wasn't always conscious for Lin Manuel either, although he's the. I had been sort of. I had been raised at. One of my undergraduate professors was Harold Bloom, who, you know, made his name with this book. The anxiety of influence that suggested all writers are locked in this kind of Oedipal struggle with their predecessors where they have to deny their most formative influences in order to kind of tear apart space in the tradition for themselves. And Lin Manuel is such the opposite that he loves giving credit to the writers who have. Who have come before him. To the point that he actually insisted that there'd be a whole page in the playbook Bill of Hamilton on Broadway that listed all the copyright acknowledgments for the samples he'd lifted from the Notorious B.I.G. and Jason, Robert Brown and Gilbert and Sullivan and Rodgers and Hammerstein because he wanted to show his work and he wanted to place himself in that tradition. So it was fun to find those moments in his work and to learn that Dr. Seuss could be responsible for the kind of penultimate stress cadence as much as a Jay Z song be. And what I'm trying to remember what. There were definitely sentence rhythms that I was. That I. That I, when I went back to read, I was like, oh, that. That rhythm came from this particular writer whom I had read, one of them that I think actually ended up getting modified for the book. But I remember as I was drafting, watching a documentary about Robert Caro, the biographer of Lyndon Baines Johnson, discussing his process of writing this magisterial six volume or what, however many installments there are now, biography and dialogue with his editor Robert Gottlieb. And I knew that that was not the scope of project that I was working on. And in fact, my editor very early on actually said to me explicitly, like, this should only be a hundred thousand words. Daniel Lin Manuel Miranda is not Lyndon Baines Johnson. And he should not get. We do not need 600,000 words on this guy. But Caro was trying to give a sense, he said, of the scope in his first book, the Power Broker, about Robert Moses remaking New York of the. The. The kind of epic scale of Moses's transformation of the city. And he said, he, he, he, he. He wanted to kind of itemize it, but he didn't want it to be wrote. And so Caro had looked back at Homer's. I Think his catalog of the ships in the Iliad and had a kind of, maybe a kind of anaphoric cadence of this litany of places where people came from to fight this war. And he thought he would try that out as a sentence structure to kind of delineate the geography of the city that this power broker, Robert Moses had transformed and hearing. Then Caro read that paragraph in which it was like the Frog's Neck Bridge on the Cross Bronx Expressway. I thought, oh, that I. What I loved about it was that basically you could make an argument through rhythm and syntax and that that would carry your reader to the sense of awe and thrill that, that, that you wanted to convey about your subject. And so I tried it at a moment where Lin manuel meets his 8th grade English teacher, Dr. Rembert Herbert, who is the. Outside the Manuel's family, to say that he could be a writer. And I wanted to convey Dr. Herbert's stature within this public magnet school on the Upper east side of New York where there were lots of learned and popular teachers. But Dr. Herbert by, by the accounts of everybody that interviewed, like, had this different aura and he had a stateliness and a gravity and he, he commanded students attention without jumping around or, or being playful, but just through his sort of quiet authority. And so I tried this Robert Caro paragraph where I listed the attributes of Dr. Herbert. He rode a motorcycle. He had a southern drawl, he had a doctorate. He used a number two pencil or whatever it was. And then I showed it to my daughter who's 13, and I said, what do you. What do you. What does this make you think? And she read it and she said, it makes me think. You only know one sentence structure. So then I had to go back and turns out it's not quite as easy to do a Robert Caro impression of Homer as I thought. But it was fun to try out these different models that I aspired to.
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Eric LeMay
That's very impressive. At 13. I was having a conversation the other day with my 9 year old and we're reading the Hobbit out loud and, and he's picking up on the fact that, that every chapter ends with some sort of pressurized event that wants you to start the next one. You know, the, the traditional cliffhanger. And I believe he actually used that word to my surprise. And one of the, one of the delights that I realized as I was reading the book is that you are using that structure. And I, and I caught myself, you know, under your influence because I would finish the end of a chapter and think, oh, now I can go to sleep, or something like that. And I'd be like, ah, I've got to read the next three pages. And then of course, I'd get swept up. And what would, what would. And the difficulty there is. And you can imagine the facts of a life pulling towards the dryer Wikipedia style. But it's clear that you're orchestrating these stories, many of which are about the thing that might not have happened and how it ended up happening. The, the work that might not have gotten made or that that could have ended here. Yeah. And I'm just curious at what point you realized that that was a form you were working in, or does that even ring true as I describe it?
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Daniel Pollock Pelzner
It rings totally true. I'm so glad that that came across to you, Eric. And that, that's the part I level that I'm most proud of is the last line of each chapter. And I always knew what the last line was going to be of the chapter before I started writing it. And then the whole goal was to get to set up that line that then would catapult the reader into the next chapter. And actually what I thought about there a lot was, was episodic television, you know, in the, in the sort of Netflix streaming mode where what's going to keep you glued to your, your couch instead of turning it off at the end of every episode, and particularly the Mode, not the sort of sitcom that resolves everything at the end of the chapter or the murder case that's solved. But my favorite type, which is the kind of the dramedy, the half hour dramedy I was really thinking of Silicon Valley was one that I used to like watching where people are trying to accomplish something. These guys are all trying to launch their ill fated computer startup and it seems like they finally worked something out and then the episode always ended by pulling out the rug from them somehow so that they're, they're one step farther away from what they're trying to achieve. And early on, one of my, one of my mentors, James Shapiro, is a wonderful Shakespeare professor and was the person actually told me to write this book, set me up with his agent and read every chapter as I drafted it. Said, you have to convey to your reader that this was not inevitable. In fact, it's highly unlikely for anybody to be able to achieve these things, let alone, you know, this, this child of immigrant parents from a tiny neighborhood in northern Manhattan who just wants to, you know, make stuff all the time. And, and you have, and he would say you have to convey how perilous a tightrope it is to walk down. And that Lin Manuel, surrounded by wonderfully creative people at every stage of his life, most of whom don't go on to be professional artists and none of whom go on to be a globalist, you know, recognized composer and performer. So that made me think, okay, how do I convey that to the reader? That it's, that this is unlikely, that it could go off the rails at many points and that there, there's a kind of peril and serendipity to the process. And I remember as I was, as I was drafting it, there was this movie that came out that, that was about the invention of the Nike Air Jordan shoe. This was a, it was a sort of fictionalized docudrama, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon movie called Air, I think about the Air Jordan. And it got a lot of attention here in Portland, Oregon, where I live, because we're the Nike headquarters. And so we all went to see this movie and I, I, it was, it's, you know, not a world changing movie, but it was quite a fun kind of, you know, how are they going to pull this off story? And I was struck watching. I was like, okay, everybody knows what the end of this story is. Everybody knows that the Air Geor Jordan is going to become the most successful shoe ever. And that Michael Jordan is, is, you know, going to become The. The most, you know, lucrative and renowned athlete of his generation. And yet it's a very suspenseful movie. And at each stage, it seems like it probably won't work out, and Jordan was probably the wrong spokesperson, and nobody's going to buy this shoe, and Converse is going to eclipse Nike and they're all going to get fired. And I was trying to think, okay, how do I. How do I convey that sense in the book, knowing that, of course, Hamilton is going to become this global sensation and Lin Manuel will become a front page name that. That didn't seem likely at many points in the process. And the key, I thought, was that nobody in the story knows what the ending of that story is going to be. And so if I can structure the chapters in a way that conveys that sense of uncertainty and precarity, then I hoped that would create more readerly interest in something whose outcome is indeed familiar to a Wikipedia reader.
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Eric LeMay
Yeah, Yeah, I think you do it marvelously. And one of the things that struck me that I thought would be a particularly naughty K and O T Y problem for a writer is that there are the struggles that might immediately click to a listener's mind, like, oh, where do you find the funding? Or how do you find the right collaborator? But there's also a facet of Lin Manuel's character that. That folds into. It might not happen. So by all accounts, he is a tremendous workaholic and. And you bring that to the forefront. But then there are also these moments in the telling where you'll point out that, you know, he's had one song for Hamilton that he performed in front of Barack Obama to great acclaim. And now two years have passed and still there's no third song or fourth song or whatever it turns out to be. So there's something about the nature of his creative process or the time in which the creation of something like a musical unfolds that's different from story time, where you need events to be turning. I was thinking about, you know, the. The various people who tried to write about Samuel Johnson's life. And he would have these, you know, periods of seven or eight years where he would be despondent and melancholic and would do nothing except kind of lay in bed. And. And so I'm just curious as to. To how your central figure. Yeah, you. You have a character that perhaps might not perform according to the way that. That characters in stories unfold in story time, because they're, you know, they're in lifetime or something like that. I'm just Trying to. To lay this out for myself.
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Daniel Pollock Pelzner
Yeah, yeah, that was. That was indeed a very interesting problem and a challenge. And I remember one of my early readers, a fellow musical theater professor, who had read a number of the chapters in the first half of the book and said, well, boy, it took Lin Manuel a long time to get his first musical in the Heights to Broadway. But maybe it doesn't need to feel that long for the reader. We shouldn't have to suffer just because he suffered, too. And I did think a lot. I remember my medieval literature professor in grad school talking to us about rhetorical dilation, this being a key medieval question of, like, what. What are the moments in this story that you want to contract? You're going to collapse, you know, many years into a sentence, and what are the moments that you want to dilate? So that we're really. We're spending. Each sentence is just a second or a minute or a. Or an hour in this process. And so I did feel like. Like the sort of fun thing about writing about a showman is that we're going to have set pieces built into the story. There's going to be opening night. There's going to be the Tony Awards. There's going to be going to the White House to perform a song for President Obama. So I knew I had those big kind of marquee moments to build toward, and those were the moments where I was going to want to dilate a lot in order to. To set up the drama and the excitement of those moments. And so that meant that I could contract some of those earlier moments. And then I felt, too, that that was. Since you're absolutely right. Lin Manuel doesn't. He is manically productive, but he doesn't tend to create unless he has a deadline or an assignment. And so that was a moment where it really took one of his collaborators to get him into gear, and that was his director, Tommy Kahl, fellow graduate of Wesleyan University, a couple years older than Lin Manuel, whose background was as a sports coach. And he was really interested in how to motivate people to do their best work and how to clear away the obstacles that could impede them. And I thought, okay, well, Lin Manuel has been languishing. He needs his director, Tommy Kail, to set him a deadline, which is, in fact, what happened and got him to write the first act of the show. But one of the principles of the book really is that Le Manuel's phenomenally inventive and creative and amazingly spongy and synthesizing figure, but none of this gets made without the collaborators who help him execute the ideas that he has bouncing around his head. And so people like the director Tommy Kail, or like his orchestrator and arranger, Alex Lacamire, who has the piano chops Lin Manuel doesn't, and can kind of hear what's inside Lin Manuel's head, but then produce it in a way that other people can hear it, too, or the great performers in his shows who have the vocal chops and the dancing skills to be able to realize for an audience what is just kind of squawking on Lin Manuel's demos. I wanted to bring out those folks, too. And so it seemed like that was a kind of those moments of frustration or of delay for Lin Manuel were the opportunities to have these other figures come into the narrative. And one of my friends who'd read an early chapter, she said, what you're really arguing, Daniel, is that artistic genius is a team sport. And I love that metaphor. I thought, that's exactly right. Even though Lumenuel's brilliantly talented, it really does take this team of people to be able to bring it to life. And then that created, of course, another narrative challenge, which is how do you distribute a reader's attention among lots of different people, almost all of whom seem to be named Alex or have similar. Similar names. And there. This is the highbrow nature of my literary influences, Eric, that you've been probing, which is that my daughter was watching Ocean's Eight. Did you ever see this? It was a heist movie in the, like, the Ocean's Eleven tradition. Ocean's Twelve, this is the all female reboot, which is with Cate Blanchett and Anne Hathaway about a, you know, a group of skilled thieves who come together to pull off a jewelry heist at the Metropolitan Gala. And it's got. So. It's got all of these different characters. And I was thinking, like, okay, here's this thing that's got. It's got a team to pull off the. The achievement. How do we follow each of them? Because my readers were just getting bogged down on all the different names in the chapters. And then I saw in the movie, like, oh, each person is introduced one by one, and they each have a superpower. Like, we meet Awkwafina, and it turns out she can crack into any, you know, computer network. She's the hacker. Or like, we meet Cate Blanchett, and she's the Swanye Elliant person who can just enter any room and instantly integrate herself with the folks around Her. And I was like, oh, that's what I need to do. I need to give everybody a superpower and then have them appear at a moment of. Of peril or danger when their superpower is what's going to save Lin Manuel from the slough of despond that he's followed into. And once I started using that structure, then I think for readers, it became less like flipping through a high school yearbook and I hope a little bit more Ocean's eight style.
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Eric LeMay
I love that. I love that. And I think it's completely in harmony with the portrait you give of Lin Manuel where. Where there's no influence that is detrimental. It's all about where you find the influence, how you pull it in. There's no distinctions, you know, the traditional high art, low art one. There's just simply, this is exciting. This is energetic. This can solve the problem I need to solve. This sounds exciting. This feels like the right move. So here you are. Are pulling on Ocean's 8 to figure out how to solve, you know, the. I often think of it as the Russian novel problem, where you can't tell what character is what character, and then you give up because they have two names. Yeah. And. And I'm curious, given. Given that likeness in the. The creative process of creating the book and the creative process of the person who's the subject of the book. Book, did you find yourself as a writer influenced by the writing about which you were writing? Right, did. Because I listened to a lot of the book as well. I was going back and forth, and it was hard not to want to try to write lyrics after you would set them out and talk about how interesting they were. And I thought this would be really fun to just try so I could feel the. The kind of movement of influence or excitement or curiosity. Yeah. I'm just curious. Are you a different writer for having encountered Lin Manuel's writing, which is different, perhaps, from the project of writing a book which must have changed you as an artist?
- [37:37]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
Yes. Yes. Yes is the answer. But not. Not. But I don't. But I think not in the style as much as in the process. So there are times where I imagine you and many of your. Your listeners have experienced this, where you're really immersed in the style of somebody that you're studying or reading, and you find they start pouring out of your own pet. I had this. I remember reading Salman Rushdie in college and just being obsessed with Midnight's Children and then getting an assignment where I basically wrote a. A terrible pastiche, Midnight's Children. Account of my own life for an autobiography project. And I remember my professor saying, like, I could, I could share this with the rest of the class, but nobody would understand a word of it. And I thought, ah, okay, so that this is sort of, you know, the only, the only thing worse than second rate Hemingway is first rate Hemingway kind of mode. So I have, I have been in that mode. But I really tried, tried consciously not to do Lin Manuel pastiche in the book. I felt much more like his lyrics are pyrotechnic enough with their layers of illusion and internal rhyme and rhythmic variety. I saw myself much more as, like I am setting up the stone wall of the nave of the cathedral so that when we put in the stained glass window, it will sparkle in the most, you know, illuminating way. But, and so I was trying, I was like, I don't want my pro. I've written things that are, I think are flashier than this book on the sort of sentence level. But I thought, I really don't want to be competing with him and, well, for the reader's attention, I want his, his writing to shine. But what I did find really changed me as a writer and I, I hope, I hope will stay with me after this book is that I, I, I had for much of my life I just really dreaded writing. And I felt, I felt so much anxiety about trying to achieve anything on the page and, you know, feeling conscious of the works that I admired and how what I wrote was never going to live up to them. And then I had the sort of crippling next step of just saying, okay, so if I don't write anything, then it won't be bad and I won't have ruined my image of myself in my head. And this led to terrible bouts of time in college where I just wouldn't turn in papers and wouldn't just like, wouldn't produce anything out of this sort of inhibiting delusion of perfectionism. And I remember watching Tick, Tick, Boom, this wonderful movie Lin Manuel made about Jonathan Larson, the composer, where Larson has to just write one song to, to present at a workshop. And he's sitting there all day and he types Y o u r into his desktop. And then like an hour later he deletes the R and types Y o u apostrophe R E. And then an hour later he like deletes that and writes Y o u r. And my sister turned to me, we were on a family vacation, and she said, she said, oh my God, I can't watch this, Daniel. That's you, you're never going to write this book. And I was really scared about that to. But the salutary factor this is where the person with superpowers swoops in to save me, is that Lin Manuel just never suffered that anxiety. He always, he told me, thought it was more interesting to start making things than to worry about whether what he made was going to be as good as the art that he admired. And he said he knew it wasn't going to be, but he knew that the process of making it was going to make it better. And when I actually had heard his demos for his, you know, the first draft of the Hamilton Songs, or read the first version of his. Of his Broadway debut In the Heights, which he wrote as a sophomore in college, you know, you sort of think like, here I am writing about this guy whom I really admire. How can I possibly put words to page? But I would see his first drafts, and they were fun, but they weren't the masterpieces that have been celebrated in the professional world because he completely rewrote them. It was not a. Not a single word from his original draft of in the Heights that made it to the Broadway version that opened eight years later, except for the title. And that seeing that. Seeing his process of just being comfortable putting something down and then sharing it with friends, getting feedback, going through revision, testing with audiences, seeing what worked, modifying it, which is what any healthy, I think, writing, artistic process would. Would look like, really freed me from my paralyzing sense that I had to get it right the first time. And that allowed me just to get a draft down and then to feel comfortable sharing it with Aunt Jude, searching for the romance and. And my in laws and other wonderful early readers who helped me know what was working and what was confusing for them. And then I think, reiterate it through four different drafts to get to the. The final version. So I felt like he gave me. He gave me that gift of freeing me from.
- [42:38]
Eric LeMay
From.
- [42:39]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
From the. The kind of terror of the blank page to just a kind of iterative process and a pleasure in. In creation that. That I hope I'll be able to take with me.
- [42:50]
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- [43:49]
Marshall Poe
Disney wants to know, are you ready?
- [43:52]
Eric LeMay
Yes.
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Marshall Poe
For Marvel Studios Thunderbolts, the New Avengers, now streaming on Disney.
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Eric LeMay
Let's do this.
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- [44:12]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
That's cool.
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Then Marvel Studios Thunderbolts, the New Avengers, rated PG 13, now streaming on. You guessed it, Disney.
- [44:19]
Eric LeMay
Yeah, it's so clear in many of the scenes where you're talking about his work with his collaborators that even if he's finding it frustrating to get feedback that, you know, this song isn't there yet, or, you know, I guess in the case of in the Heights, he had to make the journey from this is about characters to this is about a neighborhood and a community through revision after revision after revision that there's this built in joy and collaboration, you know, and for writers it's, it's possible, but it's not built in. You know, you're not in a room as you're writing, you know, at typing out little things on your keyboard and showing them to other people. So I am curious, as you were, as you were working with your aunt and you were working with your daughter, did you come to find that as a pleasure? Here's the draft, right? And she says, well, you only know how to write one kind of sentence. And I don't know.
- [45:17]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
Yes. I mean there's certainly various definitely frustration that I identify with. Like, wait, I thought this was, I thought this was going to move you to tears. And yet you, you are totally inert and don't even remember who it is who's in scene at this point. So yeah, I experienced the frustration too. But this was definitely a moment of identification with Lynn that he says his favorite moment in the process is bringing the thing he's just written to his team in Hamilton. He called it his cabinet on the presidential model Tommy Gale, the Director, Andy Blankenbuehler, the choreographer, Alex Lamar, the arranger. And I felt that, too, like, that my favorite moment was, okay, I just. Just finished drafting the chapter. I arrived at that cliffhanger line that I knew I was working toward, and now I get to immediately send it off to my, you know, seven or eight people who I'm sending each chapter to. And I was fortunate that I had. Aunt Jude was only going to give me love and tell me her favorite parts, which was great. My mom, I do remember saying, well, it looks like you're only looking for positive feedback at this point, so I'm not going to give you any feedback. And other people who, who would tell me what wasn't working as well, and, and. And I. I would have. I think I would have found that a much more vulnerable process earlier in my life, but it's another place where I felt like I was learning from my subject. So. Lemonweld shared with me an email he got from one of his composer heroes. Stephen Sondheim, arguably, you know, greatest musical theater writer of the 20th century. And Lin Manuel had just shared the end of Hamilton in with Sondheim before it opened off Broadway, and ends famously with this big choral refrain, who lives, who dies, who tells your story? Which has become kind of epigrammatic, anthemic, a whole way of looking at history as well as musicals. And the first email I wrote to Lin Manuel proposing that I write this biography had the subject line, who tells your story? Shameless attempt to crib off Hamilton to justify this project, project. And what I learned from this email was that Sondheim wrote to Lin Manuel and said, okay, this is an ambitious work, so I'm going to treat it with the rigor it deserves. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story is not the end of your show. And in fact, Sondheim said it was a. It was a pathetic end. It did not, you know, went from high to low, didn't live up to the promise of the musical. And I was sort of gobsmacked to read that. I was like, oh, my God, this. Here it is, this. This sort of canonical moment. And Lyn's hero tells him it's not working. And so I asked him, what do you do if. If somebody you admire so much gives you this note that something you're so proud of, he doesn't think is successful. And Lyn said when he got that kind of feedback and got it from other people, too, at different stages in the process, he said he would sit with it, allow himself to be annoyed at first, but then sit with it. And he said he would tell himself, okay, either, either I'm right, Lyn's right, or Sondheim is right. But he felt he hadn't earned it yet. If Sondheim wasn't on board with it, it meant he hadn't done the work to set it up in the way that he wanted readers to experience. And so either he would jettison it if he didn't care about it, or in this case, he really did care about it. But he knew he had to earn that moment for the audience. And so he wrote a whole new soliloquy for Hamilton, facing Aaron Burr's bullet hurtling toward him at, at the moment of his death, in which Hamilton expands on his own journey to become a question of legacy and the question of his, his country's legacy as well as his own. America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me. And that was what allowed him to bridge Hamilton's story to these kind of meta historical reflections on who tells your story. And so I tried to adopt that mode too. If somebody's telling me, no, Daniel, this moment you're so proud of did nothing for me, okay, maybe they're right, maybe I'm right, but I haven't earned it yet. What can I do to actually set up that moment?
- [49:21]
Eric LeMay
When you proposed the book to Lin Manuel, did you know that you would be able to write it?
- [49:28]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
You mean, did I know that he would agree to it or did I know that I would be able to, to carry it on?
- [49:32]
Eric LeMay
Did you know that you would be sufficient to the subject that you would be able to produce the book?
- [49:39]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
You know, there are so many times in my life that I've been crippled with self doubt and this was not one of them. Oddly, the moment that James Shapiro said, you need to write a book and it needs to be about Lin Manuel Miranda, that clicked for me. And I thought, I do. I have spent 10 years learning about this guy. I know a lot about him and what I don't know about him, I'm really curious to learn about. And, and I knew it wasn't, I knew he didn't need any more praise. It wasn't just going to be, I mean, it is a pretty sympathetic book, but it wouldn't just be cheering him on. And I had written plenty of critical stuff actually about him already and I didn't feel like I needed to do that anymore. So I knew what it was going to be about was his education. What I wanted to do was understand how he learned to become an artist at each. Each phase of his development. And I felt like it was just. It was driven out of curiosity. And I think whenever in my life, I replace judgment with curiosity. Things do well, and I'm not worried. Is this good or bad? Or am I. Can I do it or not? It's just. I'm curious about this. I want to learn about it. Then I did. I. Then I didn't have any doubt that my curiosity would be sustained by the project and that I would get to. That I would get to figure out what I wanted to. What I wanted to learn. And I did. I would always think of the Melville line from Moby Dick. To write a mighty book, you need a mighty theme. I felt like Le Manuel was a mighty theme for, you know, artists of the 21st century. Like he had done this work and that he would be a worthy subject to pursue and that it was at least in a sweet enough spot for me as an American history major in college who'd been obsessed with musical theater since I was a kid and had been visiting New York all my life to see my grandparents there and an educator. It felt like this was in my. In my wheelhouse of things that I was at least fascinated by and would want to share with a reader.
- [51:32]
Eric LeMay
I think that's a beautiful kind of testament to curiosity as a driver of creativity, because curiosity lets the judgment go. I often will talk to my students. You know, they'll say, well, I don't know if I can write a book, or what would it mean to write a book? And I try to reframe it along the lines of something like, you know, you are this being who's absorbed all of this art and who has all of these interests. And so you are some kind of unique instrument out of which some. Some song is meant to be played, some book is meant to emerge. You know, what is the book that only you could write based on the influences, the history and the interests that you have of. And when I. When I think about you writing this book and what I know of you and some of the history that we've shared, I'm like, of course.
- [52:28]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
Right.
- [52:28]
Eric LeMay
Of course. Daniel even sings.
- [52:31]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
Right.
- [52:32]
Eric LeMay
Like. And you write so beautifully and powerfully about how the music works, which is, of course, a writerly challenge. Like, how do you write about something that has no words? Words? And, you know, that was a little moment as well, a bunch of little moments as a fellow writer. I was like, ah, I feel like you've translated that music into language in a way that I can appreciate.
- [52:56]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
It.
- [52:58]
Eric LeMay
Yeah. So maybe I'll, I'll ask you that as we start to move towards the end of our chat. Having written this book, right. We all like accrue power and possibility by working through a project this big.
- [53:13]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
Big.
- [53:14]
Eric LeMay
What do you imagine you're capable of or curious to do next? I know you're going to be on tour with this book for some time, but I'm sure your creative self is bubbling in one way or another.
- [53:28]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
That's true. Eric, I love, I love the way that you described it. And I don't want to convey the sense that I knew that I could write a book that was always a, I would say for my life, a doubt. But that was something that this project taught me, was that I could, I could write a book. In fact, I wrote far too much of a book. The publisher wanted a hundred thousand words and I ended up turning in 200,000 words. Never occurred to me I would write more books than they needed it to be. You were very dilated. Exactly. Yes. It was like coming out of the ophthalmologist's office and all the light is beaming, digging straight into your pupil. So it was really about putting on sunglasses and figuring out what could I filter out to make it. To make it actually intelligible for a reader to pursue. And I did worry. I mean, it took Lin Manuel a long time to feel like he could create from his full self. He was quite conscious of being Lin Manuel Miranda at home in a Spanish speaking neighborhood, being Lyn at school and majority non Latino educational environments. And it really wasn't until he, he lived in a Latino cultural house in college that he started writing music that he felt reflected his full sense of self and getting the confidence to sort of create as Lin Manuel Miranda. And I wondered that as I was writing this book of like, am I writing with enough of myself? Because I didn't, I sort of didn't want it. I didn't want my own writing to be show offy in the, in the way that I was describing earlier. I wanted Linds to be the get the spotlight. But I wondered if that meant there wasn't enough of me in it. But I think there's the great song at the end of Stephen Sondheim's musical about creating a work of art. Sunday in the park with George, about George Seurat, French pointillist painter who's trying to make a masterpiece. And his descendant is worried about creating anything, whether it'll be new or not. And his beloved says to him, anything you do, let it come from you, then it will be new. And just echoing what you tell your students so wonderfully, Eric, that anything that you create will have your own fingerprints on it. So I had to sort of trust that process. And I remember circling back to that scholarly background that you were mentioning earlier going, starting this book tour and I did an event at Princeton with a professor of Latinx theater who said this is such a Shakespeare professor's book about Lin Manuel because all you want to do is find his sources and document that in the book. And I thought, oh, maybe I, maybe I. Maybe my own interests are visible in it after all, some way, so long way of saying this book taught me that I could write a book and now I want to do it again. I think I have that feeling of like the person who's run their first marathon or climbed their first mountain. It was like that seemed unattainable, insummonable. And now that I've done it, it was a high that I want to chase. And so I'm trying to find what the subject is that would sustain my curiosity for the whatever three to five years that it would take to pursue it and that I feel like I could both learn something from myself and then teach something to readers by pursuing. Hmm.
- [56:42]
Eric LeMay
So you are right now an impulse without a focus.
- [56:48]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
That's a great way of describing why I'm so fidgety. Yes. If any of your listeners have suggestions. I think since I had, I mean I really had this sort of sing in me museum inception moment of just, you know, the phone ringing and somebody whom I really trusted telling me what to do. And. And it, and it clicked the minute it was said. I'm. I'm waiting, I think, for that next phone call. If somebody's saying, here's what you should do next, Daniel. And that gut feeling of yes, this is indeed what I need to do. But I also think of Lin Manuel always had this challenge of the follow up project. And after his first musical in the Heights, he'd spent eight years since he was in college working on. He decided what he needed to do before he. He said he put everything he knew into his first show. And so to write his next show he needed to learn more. And so he did a lot of collaborations with other people. And he worked, translated lyrics from west side Story into Spanish for Stephen Sondheim. He wrote songs for Stephen Schwartz, composer of Wicked on a. On a new musical. He wrote this cheerleader musical just sort of, you know, let the soil replenish its nutrients. Before he started planting Again. So I do wonder if I need to, I need to kind of of I need to sponge for a little while before I can start squeezing and having interesting things come out.
- [58:01]
Eric LeMay
That, that sounds perfectly reasonable. I think one of the things that I took away from your account is that that also the, the project like Hamilton and, and the warriors, which I guess he's now also working on. He, he framed them originally for himself in ways that were much more doable. They were concept albums rather than full blown productions. And so there was this sense of like, well, I'm just gonna follow and do this strange little thing. I'm gonna try to, you know, take Alexander Hamilton and see if I can do the story of his life in Burr's mouth or something like that. And they gradually accrue and build. And so yeah, I thought about like, ah, on some level is he tricking himself into moving towards larger projects by framing them in ways that aren't so intimidating to begin with? And I'm sure that's more about me than him.
- [59:00]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
No, I think that's astute, Eric. I think you're absolutely right. It's always, it's always overcoming the starting inertia that's the, the biggest challenge in any project. And I felt that for me too, of like, okay, I don't know how to write a book, but if it's going to be, you know, a hundred thousand words, say that that's is my math, right? 20 chapters and each chapter is 5,000 words. Like I know how to write 5,000 words from having done these New Yorker articles that were about that length. So it's like, okay, all I have to do is write one of those every, you know, month or so and then, and then I'll have a book by the end of it. And so, and I've read wonderful essay collections of yours that accrue from, from, you know, beautiful gems that you've then set into a necklace or a bigger setting. So maybe that's the way to start, is the, is the little piece of it and then see if it's something that satisfies my curiosity by the end of it or that really sparks it that I want to pursue further.
- [59:49]
Eric LeMay
Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I hope that, that, that in three to five years you will come back and we can have another conversation.
- [59:57]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
Aaron, it's such a privilege to be read by as perceptive a writer and reader and teacher as you. And that really, really justifies everything that went into this book to have you reflect it back to me in such a generous and insightful way. I'm really grateful for that.
- [60:14]
Eric LeMay
Oh, it's a joy to read. And if, if, if our listeners have made it this far, the book is Lin Manuel Miranda, the Education of an Artist, Hollock Pelzner. It is done with joy and it is done with vivacity. And it is deeply intelligent, I think deeply sympathetic. And, yeah, it reads like a page turner. Congratulations.
- [60:41]
Daniel Pollock Pelzner
Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Eric, what a treat to talk with you.
- [60:44]
Eric LeMay
Great to talk with you. My name is Eric Lemay, and you've been listening to an interview with Daniel Pollock Pelzner, author of Lin Manuel Miranda the Education of an Artist, here on the New Books Network.