ProloguePROLOGUE When I first met Lin-Manuel Miranda to discuss this project, he was trying to help his four-year-old log on to Disney Plus. It was a clear, wintry day in 2022, and he'd invited me to the Drama Book Shop, a shrine to playwriting in Midtown Manhattan's theater district that had given him and his friends a basement space after college to work on the show that became his first Broadway musical, In the Heights . Between substitute teaching and dancing at bar mitzvahs to pay his rent, he'd pop down to the bookshop basement and figure out a song on its creaky piano. He now owned the bookshop with one of his earliest collaborators on that show. He pointed out a perk of ownership--"Free coffee!"--when we filled our cups at the café and found a table to chat. But before we did that, he had to help his son crack the Disney app. The little guy wanted to watch Encanto . I had to suppress a laugh. If anyone should have Disney Plus streaming without a hitch, it ought to be the songwriter who supplied its most beloved content. The Broadway smash Hamilton more or less launched Disney Plus when the show's live film version was released on the service in 2020, quickly becoming its most-streamed title. Disney's Encanto , for which Lin-Manuel wrote the songs, was the most-streamed movie in the world in 2022, bested the next year by Disney's Moana , also with songs by Lin-Manuel. Numbers like "We Don't Talk About Bruno" and "Surface Pressure" from Encanto became so popular that Billboard named Lin-Manuel its 2022 songwriter of the year, ranked higher even than Taylor Swift. In addition to his multiple Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and the MacArthur "genius grant," Lin-Manuel had arguably created the soundtrack to the post-pandemic world. He redefined musical storytelling by synthesizing his Latino heritage with his love of hip-hop, Broadway, and every other form of pop culture he'd encountered, the rare theater artist to become a household name. And yet that didn't mean the iPad app worked better for his family than for anyone else's. It had been a crazy year, Lin-Manuel told me after he'd gotten his son logged on. With studio release calendars reshuffled by the pandemic, he'd had four movies come out in the past eight months. In addition to Encanto , there was the film version of In the Heights , an animated musical for Sony called Vivo , and his directorial debut on Netflix, a film based on Rent composer Jonathan Larson's autobiographical musical Tick, Tick... Boom! . Even for an artist who famously writes like he's running out of time, it was a lot. But now, he said, his calendar was finally clear. He had nothing going on except helping his older son get ready for school. And cowriting a concept album based on the 1979 movie The Warriors . And composing the songs for the Lion King prequel, Mufasa . And finishing a new musical with one of his composer heroes, John Kander. And polishing the score for a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid with another of his heroes, Alan Menken. And working out a performance with Andrew Lloyd Webber to celebrate the queen's jubilee. When he talked about these projects, he didn't seem burdened or overwhelmed. He looked giddy. In a gray overcoat, sweater, and jeans, with a scruffy pandemic goatee, he could barely sit still. After leading me down to the Drama Book Shop basement, he started playing tunes on an old piano, popping up to illustrate dance steps, then whipping out his laptop to show me video clips. Unlike his early days in that basement, he no longer had financial worries. With the success of Hamilton , he said, he had the freedom to pursue projects that met his main criterion: "I like to work on things I'll learn from." It was that appetite for learning that had drawn me to Lin-Manuel. As a theater professor and an arts journalist, I'd written about his career before. Trained as a Shakespeare scholar, I wondered who our Shakespeares might be today--artists telling national stories in innovative dramatic forms--and in 2016, the head of New York's Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, suggested I check out the guy who'd just created a hip-hop musical about the American Revolution. For the New Yorker , I covered the 2017 opening of Hamilton in London, and I traveled to Puerto Rico for the Atlantic in 2019 when Lin-Manuel took Hamilton there on a fundraising tour after Hurricane Maria. I wrote about his contributions to Moana and Mary Poppins Returns --sometimes appreciatively, sometimes critically. And every time I heard him speak, what struck me, besides his exuberance, was his interest in trying things that would help him learn new skills. For a songwriter who'd already found so much success, he seemed almost insatiable in his desire to expand his tool kit. His collaborators noticed it too. "Lin is the best in the world at what he does because he's continually challenging himself," Jared Bush, the screenwriter for Moana and Encanto , told me. "He has this constant desire to keep improving, stretching, and learning." And that desire, his longtime friends say, has characterized his approach to creativity for years. "Without diminishing his talent, I don't think of him as a genius," says Owen Panettieri, his college friend and vice president of Lin-Manuel's company 5000 Broadway Productions. "It's a bit of a disservice to say, 'Oh, he's just brilliant,' or 'Oh, he has this gift.' Maybe there's some truth to that, but I don't believe that's the key to his success over decades. If you really want to create art that's lasting, there's work and there's sacrifice, and there's also a commitment to openness and learning. He works really hard, and he continues to learn, and that, more than anything, is what helps." Comments like that intrigued me. I wanted to find out what Lin-Manuel had learned. I knew the output; I was curious to figure out the input. And doing so, I suspected, might help me reach a different understanding of creativity. Many of us assume that some people come into the world as inherent creators, and we imagine masterpieces springing, fully formed, from the brains of those unique geniuses. If any work seemed to illustrate that idea, it would surely be Hamilton . Lin-Manuel was the originator, the lyricist, the composer, the scriptwriter, and the star, motoring through brilliant raps on Broadway that changed the way America tells its origin story. If you encountered Lin-Manuel only as Alexander Hamilton, you might think he was a born genius. And yet I soon learned that was not how most people who knew Lin-Manuel as a child would have described him. Though he had the promise to test into a Manhattan public school for gifted children, he wasn't considered the best writer in his cohort, or the best composer, or the best musician. He was kind, enthusiastic, smart, and imaginative, and he had charisma onstage, if not particular singing talent. He enjoyed making up songs with his toys, but so do lots of children. Coming up with a ditty like "The Garbage Pail Kids are in town!" in preschool doesn't guarantee that three decades later you'll come up with a line like "I'm past patiently waitin'. I'm passionately smashin' / Every expectation, every action's an act of creation!" He had to learn how to become an artist. What people did recognize in Lin-Manuel back then was a burning desire to create art and a limitless curiosity about ways to do it better. He sat up close to his elementary-school bus driver, an aspiring rapper from the Bronx who taught his passengers to repeat bars from early hip-hop groups like the Sugarhill Gang and the Geto Boys. He memorized tracks from his sister's '80s cassette tapes so he could lip-synch to them at the school talent show, and he watched Disney animated musicals over and over until he could perform the soundtracks for his classmates. He apprenticed himself to the older high-school students who directed plays and wrote original scripts so he could learn to direct and write as well. And he embraced the messy process of making things--movies, plays, musicals--as stages in his growth rather than referenda on his ability. Masterpieces didn't turn up in his hands overnight. When it opened in 2015, Hamilton was the eighth musical that the thirty-five-year-old creator had written, if you counted his scripts back through college and high school. Hamilton itself required seven years of development. It took Lin-Manuel a long time to become a genius. That process of learning to create was also a process of learning to draw on all the different parts of his identity. Lin-Manuel grew up between cultures. Both his parents came to New York from Puerto Rico and raised him and his sister in a largely Spanish-speaking immigrant neighborhood at the northernmost tip of Manhattan. At Lin-Manuel's elementary school, which drew from communities all over the island, many of his classmates couldn't pronounce his name. He became Lin at school and Lin-Manuel at home. He spent summers with his grandparents near San Juan, but he didn't speak Spanish well enough to fit in with the other kids. He was too much of an outsider in Puerto Rico, too Puerto Rican on the Upper East Side. It wasn't until he got to college that he met other children of the Caribbean diaspora and felt like he didn't have to code-switch anymore. It was the late 1990s, the era of the Latin crossover boom in pop music, and for the first time, he tried writing salsa and merengue tunes. He had to learn how to make art that reflected his fully hyphenated self and how to create opportunities for people, like himself, who hadn't felt represented in a lot of mainstream media. It took hard work to grow into the name Lin-Manuel Miranda. This slowly unfolding genesis wasn't a solo act. He benefited from devoted parents, from schools that allowed him to try creative projects and supported his experiments, from many influential mentors who gave him opportunities to demonstrate his potential, and from creative partners who improved his ideas. Early on, Lin-Manuel figured out that he could create better work by collaborating with his talented classmates. He enlisted his friends to help him make movies on the weekends at his house. He recruited the best musicians to play the scores for his musical projects. He found better actors and singers than himself to star in his scripts. And he handed his drafts over to directors who could strengthen his initial impulses. Over and over--in high school, in college, as a young professional--he gathered artists around him to execute something that none of them could make alone. He'd realized, in other words, that artistic genius is a team sport. He also learned how to become a valued collaborator. Every skill that his Broadway and Disney partners praise him for now--that he's infectiously enthusiastic and upbeat, that he's ready to support the best idea no matter who comes up with it, that he's willing to cut his own material when it doesn't work, that he's always lifting up his fellow artists--is something he figured out how to do, through trial and error, in his early years. For that, he credits his mentors--not only the elementary-school music teacher who cast him in his first play and the college thesis adviser who put up with his idea for an original musical, but peers like the high-school girlfriend who showed him how to support his fellow actors, and the singers in his a cappella group who taught him how to turn melody into harmony. When he won his first Tony Award, he thanked his eighth-grade English teacher, Dr. Rembert Herbert, for telling him that he was a writer. There was luck involved too. Lin-Manuel had the good fortune to come of age in New York in the 1990s, when hip-hop was becoming mainstream, Latin pop was finding English-language listeners, Disney movies were rediscovering musical-theater structures, and Broadway was returning to the sounds of the contemporary airwaves. He emerged on the professional scene at the same time as Barack Obama, when immigrant stories and the promise of multiethnic identities drove the American narrative. But he also developed the skills to transform everything he absorbed into material for his own stories and to attract the collaborators who could help him share those stories with an audience at the right time. It wasn't obvious that anyone needed to find the overlapping center of the Venn diagram that included Jonathan Larson, The Little Mermaid , Marc Anthony, and the Notorious B.I.G. until Lin-Manuel gained the confidence to map all his influences onto an American musical. In the basement of the Drama Book Shop, I gave Lin-Manuel my pitch. I wanted to write a book about his education as an artist, focusing on the range of teachers--friends, relatives, classroom instructors, mentors, professionals--who helped him learn how to do what he now does so well. He agreed. During the next two years, I met with Lin-Manuel over a dozen times to learn the story of his first forty-two years--not womb to tomb, of course, but something like womb to Tick, Tick... Boom! . As I interviewed over a hundred and fifty of his teachers and collaborators, from his elementary-school bus driver to Andrew Lloyd Webber, I started to piece together a fuller picture of his education. I visited his family in Puerto Rico, toured the campuses that nourished him at Hunter College High School and Wesleyan University, and looked through the elementary-school projects and report cards that his mother had saved in her Upper Manhattan home. I also pored through early scripts, rough recordings, and grainy videos of sixth-grade musicals, high-school one-acts, college projects, and pre-Broadway experiments. No journalist had seen these unpublished pieces beyond the glimpses Lin-Manuel occasionally posted on his Twitter account, but they provided a key to unlocking his growth as an artist. Over and over, I found that it was those early encounters, those initial, fumbling forays, those persistent, driving questions that shaped what Lin-Manuel went on to create in his professional career, even as he continually expanded his skill set to address those questions. Just as frequently as they used the word genius , friends, collaborators, and teachers described Lin-Manuel as a sponge --for ideas, for learning, for technical knowledge, for pop culture, for American art in all its forms. There, I thought, was a metaphor that anyone could apply, that didn't require special gifts to demonstrate. Perhaps Lin-Manuel's story--viewed not as a blueprint but as a mindset--could inspire my own students. What can you absorb? What can you filter from your environment? What can you soak up and then turn into your own? How can you approach the world around you as a space for learning, for collaboration, for bringing all of yourself to fruition? The stories I heard about Lin-Manuel weren't all triumphal narratives. He wrote songs that had to be scrapped. He wrote entire shows that didn't work. He spent years on projects that stalled out, that studios abandoned, that met an indifferent or even hostile reception. He got upset with his collaborators and had to apologize. He made mistakes--sometimes, as his reach and renown grew, on a national scale. On a few occasions, his timing aligned perfectly with a broader cultural wave; at other moments, he found himself out of step. He had to learn not only how to become an artist but how to become a leader--even, at times, the public face of policies and choices that he felt were thrust upon him. And he had to learn when to step aside, when to redefine what he calls his lane, and when to boost other voices above his own. At that initial meeting, Lin-Manuel made one request of me. His father, Luis, had garnered a lot of attention as a high-profile political consultant, and though both parents were irrepressible champions of their son's work, he didn't feel that his mother, Luz, had received enough credit for being his primary teacher. As a child psychologist, she was the one who had helped him process his often overwhelming emotions and learn how to channel them into art. He asked if I would interview her first. I agreed. Excerpted from Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
