Alexander Hamilton (book)  Alexander Hamilton is a 2004 biography of American statesman Alexander Hamilton, written by historian and biographer Ron Chernow. Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, was an instrumental promoter of the U.S. Constitution, founder of the nation's financial system, and its first Secretary of the Treasury. The book, which was met with mostly positive acclaim, went on to win the inaugural George Washington Book Prize for early American history and was a nominee for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. In 2015, the book was adapted into the musical "Hamilton" by playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda. The stage production went on to win numerous accolades, including 11 Tony Awards. Before working on "Alexander Hamilton", Chernow had previously written multiple books in the topics of business and finance. In 1990, he published "The House of Morgan", which covered the life of financier J.P. Morgan and went on to win the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In 1998, he wrote a biography about John D. Rockefeller which remained on "The New York Times" Best Seller list for 16 weeks. In 1999, Chernow shifted his emphasis away from business moguls to start a biography in a new topic, American politics. He later cited his change in focus, "as a way to broaden my scope, and to stay fresh" after being inundated with requests for further biographies about Gilded Age industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Therefore, Chernow called Hamilton his "exit strategy". This book would allow a foray into constitutional law and foreign policy while still including a large financial dimension. Chernow began the writing process in 1998 by going through more than 22,000 pages of Hamilton's papers and archival research around the world. He described Hamilton's extensive writing by calling him, "the human word machine", saying he "must have produced the maximum number of words that a human being can scratch out in 49 years". Over the course of his writing and research, Chernow also took the time to dive deeper into Hamilton's history. He held the dueling pistols used in the famous Burr–Hamilton duel, visited the jail cell on Saint Croix where Hamilton's mother was imprisoned, went to the island of Bequia where Hamilton's father disappeared to after abandoning his illegitimate son, and had a lock of Alexander's hair genetically tested for his racial makeup. Chernow explained Hamilton in his book by stating, "If Washington is the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government."