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When biographer Amanda Vaill read Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (2004), her first thought, she said in a recent interview, was “Oh! Somebody should write about Hamilton’s wife and her sister! He’s married to Eliza but seems to be attracted to Angelica!” But, Vaill added, “I was in the middle of a book of my own, so it wasn’t going to be me.” At about the same time, Lin-Manuel Miranda also read Chernow’s book. By 2015, Miranda’s hip-hop musical Hamilton had opened off-Broadway, where Vaill saw it shortly before it moved to Broadway.

By then Vaill, past recipient of a Guggenheim, Peabody, and Emmy for her work as a writer and documentary screenwriter, had c

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