Purchase
Penguin
April 2005
On Sale: March 29, 2005
Featuring: Alexander Hamilton
860 pages
ISBN: 0143034758
EAN: 9780143034759
Kindle: B000QJLQZI
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
The inspiration for the hit Broadway musical
Hamilton!
In the first full-length
biography of Alexander Hamilton in decades, National Book
Award winner Ron Chernow tells the riveting story of a man
who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the
newborn America. According to historian Joseph Ellis,
Alexander Hamilton is “a robust full-length portrait, in my
view the best ever written, of the most brilliant,
charismatic and dangerous founder of them all.” Few
figures in American history have been more hotly debated or
more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton.
Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the
record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and
economic greatness of today’s America is the result of
Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were
often wildly disputed during his time. “To repudiate his
legacy,” Chernow writes, “is, in many ways, to repudiate the
modern world.” Chernow here recounts Hamilton’s turbulent
life: an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the
Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm,
rising to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the
Continental Army, coauthoring The Federalist Papers,
founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party,
and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United
States. Historians have long told the story of
America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic
ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton.
Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary
ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by
passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the
foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a
Hamilton far more human than we’ve encountered before—from
his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his
intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic
feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and
from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his
loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before
has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton’s famous and
mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of
1804. Chernow’s biography is not just a portrait of
Hamilton, but the story of America’s birth seen through its
most central figure. At a critical time to look back to our
roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the purpose
of our institutions and our heritage as Americans.
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