‘He always had to fight the residual sadness of the driven man, the unspoken melancholy of the prodigy,” Chernow observes. While others resented him with a furious passion or gaped at him with amazement – Talleyrand considered him one of the three greatest men of the epoch – Hamilton himself was lacerated with a feeling of “personal inadequacy that the world seldom saw.’‘

David Brooks’ NYT review of Chernow’s biography of HAMILTON. Long before the musical…