Lin-Manuel Miranda seems to have accomplished the impossible.

In the brutal business world of Broadway shows, where only a handful of new plays recoup their costs, Miranda’s hit musical In the Heights opened on Broadway in 2008 when he was just 28 years old, followed by the phenomenon known as Hamilton in 2015, when he was 35.

How did the sensitive child of two Puerto Rican immigrants who worked day and night become one of the most prolific and celebrated musical theater artists of our time?

That’s the story Portland journalist and Shakespeare scholar Daniel Pollack-Pelzner set out to tell in his new biography, Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist, which he’ll be talking about at Powell’s City of Books at 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 21.

Evan before he pitched his idea for the book to Miranda, Pollack-Pelzner knew he didn’t want to paint a portrait of a natural genius. Instead, he saw Miranda as an artist who has a remarkable openness to collaboration as well as an ability to learn from others, whether it was his grade school music teacher, Ms. Ames, who wrote extra parts for the school plays so that everyone could participate, or his hero Stephen Sondheim, the legendary composer and lyricist who admired and mentored his work in turn.  

Pollack-Pelzner and I recently met in his office at Portland State University, where he’s a visiting scholar whose course titles include “Shakespeare’s Villains” and “The American Musical,” and whose walls are covered with posters advertising plays he’s taken his students to see.  

From the moment he considered writing a book about Miranda, he says he envisioned one that would be “not praising or blaming but just about his education – about how he learned to do what he does – and maybe that could be of use to my students who want to have careers in the arts. So I sent him an email with that pitch: ‘I want to write about the teachers who inspired you.’”

A few years before that, though, Pollack-Pelzner’s first face-to-face interaction with Miranda wasn’t particularly promising.

“I got to interview Lin a couple of times, and I’d written about his dad, and I’d written about his writing partner, Quiara [Alegría Hudes], but the first time I met him in person was at a Hamilton exhibition in Chicago, and I’d just written something about Mary Poppins and the history of blackface that got quite a bit of blowback.”

Miranda was one of the stars of Mary Poppins Returns, which features a character named Topsy, who Pollack-Pelzner pointed out in his 2019 New York Times article has roots in racist caricatures. When a press agent introduced the two men, Miranda said, “I know who you are,” leaving Pollack-Pelzner to think, “Hmm, this might not go so well.”

As it turns out, though, they had friends in common. “One of my singing buddies in college had been in Lin’s A Capella group in high school, and it turned out, his high school girlfriend had been in a play with me in college as well.”

Indirectly, his connection with the creator of Hamilton had begun even years before that.   

“I grew up in Portland. My grandparents in New York. My grandma grew up in Washington Heights in the apartment above her dad’s kosher deli, and every spring break my sister and I would visit our grandparents in New York, and they’d take us to see Broadway shows.” In 2008, when Miranda’s first Broadway hit, In the Heights, opened, Pollack-Pelzner was living on the East Coast.

“Grandma wanted to take us to see it because it was her neighborhood. You could see on the set design the Hebrew lettering for the Jewish immigrant wave underneath the German and Irish immigrant waves along with the Caribbean, Latin American waves, too.”

Seven years later, it was his grandmother, once again, who got him interested in Miranda’s newest show, a musical called Hamilton.

“I remember 2015 when the show opened we went back to New York for my grandmother’s 90^th birthday. We had one night when my parents offered to babysit our kids, who were quite little then, and my wife said she would take me to a fancy dinner in New York or to see this new musical called Hamilton that was opening on Broadway.”

His choice? The fancy dinner. “But it was my grandma who said, ‘No, you have to see this new show. It’s the next big thing.’ It was in previews and on the night we went, Joe Biden, who was then vice president, happened to be sitting down the row from us, and as a Shakespeare professor, I remember thinking that watching the parade of vice presidents on stage while sitting next to the sitting vice president is as close as I could come to seeing Macbeth [while] sitting down the row from King James in 1606. [It was] a performance of American power for the representative of American power.”

Pollack-Pelzner says he’d missed the first 400 years of Shakespeare’s performance history, and he was eager to follow Miranda’s phenomenal work in the present day.

He reported on Hamilton when it was performed in London and Puerto Rico, but it wasn’t until April 2021, when Pollack-Pelzner was thrown a curve ball with his own career, that he decided to write a book.

“I had been in a transition from my previous university – I was embroiled in a lawsuit,” he says. As reported by The Oregonian/Oregon Live, he accused McMinnville’s Linfield University of firing him for tweeting about allegations of sexual misconduct and antisemitic comments by university leaders.

Before the university offered him a settlement in 2023, “one of my mentors, Jim Shapiro, said litigation is terrible. You need to write a book to distract yourself. He said, ‘Nobody cares about Shakespeare anymore; write about this guy you’ve been tracking around the world, Lin-Manuel Miranda.’”

The idea made sense to Pollack-Pelzner. “I took my dog for a walk, and I was missing my students, and I remember thinking, ‘Well, this is a guy who always talks about what he learns from the people he’s collaborated with and how he chooses projects based on what he can learn from his next set of partners.”

As it turns out, Sondheim had died not long before Pollack-Pelzner sent his pitch, and Miranda said that he’d been reflecting on his mentors and how he could honor them. “He invited me to meet in the drama bookshop where he’d written his shows and just started launching into all these amazing stories about working with Stephen Sondheim and about Sondheim visiting him in high school and what his mother used to tell him when he was anxious as a kid.”

From there, Miranda put Pollack-Pelzner in touch with the people who’d influenced him, beginning with his parents, Luis A. Miranda Jr. and Luz Towns-Miranda, who gave him access “to all the elementary school stuff that they still had in boxes, and they’ve been wonderfully supportive of the project for the last three years.”

Of all of Miranda’s mentors — including musical theater royalty like John Kander, who wrote the scores for Chicago and Cabaret – one of the most surprising to Pollack-Pelzner was Duane Baker, Miranda’s fourth-grade school bus driver.

Baker’s family, which was from the Bronx, where hip-hop had been born, ran the bus service that took kids on the 40-minute drive from upper Manhattan to public magnet schools, including Hunter College Elementary, which Miranda attended. The Bakers were friends with the Sugarhill Gang, the early hip-hop group that broke through to the pop charts with their song “Rapper’s Delight.” The family, says Pollack-Pelzner, “were not just singing hip-hop, but they were a conduit from the world of hip-hop to Lin’s life.”

Because Baker wanted to be a rapper, too, he practiced singing during the 40-minute ride from upper Manhattan to Lin’s school. “Some of the kids were goofing off, but little Lin-Manuel would sit right behind the driver’s seat and would memorize what Duane Baker taught him to sing … and come to school with these rap lyrics in his head.”

Pollack-Pelzner was so fascinated by all the stories Miranda told him about his mentors, that an early draft of his book was a whopping 200,000 words. “I think [it] had a chapter on every year of Lin’s education,” he laughs.

When it came to editing the manuscript, he took inspiration from Miranda, who had also had to cut and/or re-shape his famous works.

“His high school girlfriend still had the first draft of In the Heights that he wrote when he was a sophomore in college, and there’s not a single word or note or song from that draft that made it to the final version, except for the phrase ‘in Washington Heights.’”

“I so often think that people are just born with the ability to make great things, and masterpieces just spring into the world fully formed, and here was a guy who was phenomenally talented at every stage of his career but really had to learn how to do all the things that he wanted to do, and had to scrap the earliest versions of everything that he did.”

Commenting on a first draft of the song “My Shot” from Hamilton, for example, Sondheim gave Miranda a note: “There’s a lot of verbosity here.” In turn, Pollack-Pelzner’s agent said to him, “‘Do you think Stephen Sondheim was talking about you, too?’”

In time, he honed his book into a smooth, compelling read, infusing the chapters on the challenges of creating In the Heights and Hamilton with page-turning suspense, even when readers are bound to already be familiar with the extent of Miranda’s success.

For his research, he did more than 150 interviews with Miranda’s family, friends and mentors and had his own large cast of characters that he needed to bring to life on the page.

“My daughter was watching Ocean’s 8, that really delightful all-female reboot of the Ocean’s franchise. That’s a movie with eight protagonists, plus Anne Hathaway, all of whom have to be introduced.”  

Each of the film’s characters, he realized, has a superpower – “one is the code breaker, one is the safecracker, one is the sort of soigné socialite.” He decided, then, to make Miranda’s artistic collaborators stand out for readers by emphasizing the unique superpowers they each possessed.

For example, in the chapter where Miranda is putting together a team to work on In the Heights, Pollack-Pelzner shows that Miranda’s insightful writing partner, Quiara Alegría Hudes, was the one who saw that the show was really more about the Washington Heights Latine community itself than the individual love stories.

To create a lively and intimate portrait, Pollack-Pelzner also gave himself a crash course on popular music. Because he sounds so comfortable writing about rap in the book, I wrongly assumed he’d always been a fan.

“I’m glad it felt that way to you. I think I was the only white Jewish middle class kid in the ’90s who wasn’t listening to hip-hop, so I had to do so much catching up. This is the height of bougie geekiness, but every Peloton ride I’ve done in the last four years has been ’90s hip-hop.” As a result, he came to appreciate what Miranda had been teaching the world ever since In the Heights opened: that hip-hop is full of “amazing storytelling and wordplay.”

Growing up going to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival every year, Pollack-Pelzner says he always thought that being a Shakespeare teacher would be the best job. Since then, he’s become enthusiastic about sharing works from a wide range of living theater artists, such as Mary Kathryn Nagal, an Indigenous playwright and attorney, who writes about tribal sovereignty and believes she can create social and legal change.

“Learning about Lin’s education and in particular these school spaces at his high school and his college that allowed him to create his own work and add his voice to the canons of art he was studying really changed my own approach to teaching classes,” says Pollack-Pelzner.

Now in his American musical course, students propose ideas for their own shows, coming up with songs and script outlines and plans for staging scenes and costumes. Some of the projects that have come from the class have included a musical about a family’s journey from Cambodia to the U.S., a show about an LGBTQ character finding acceptance in rural Oregon, and a hip-hop musical about women of the Koran.

“I’m very grateful,” he says, “that PSU and my colleagues here have created spaces that would allow a next generation of Lin-Manuels to tell their stories, too.”

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Daniel Pollack-Pelzner will talk about his book Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St., at 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 21, where he’ll be in conversation with Lindsey Mantoan, the Ronni Lacroute Chair in Theatre Arts and an Associate Professor at Linfield University.