He inspired the hit musical Hamilton.
For his next act, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow aims to inspire the fourth annual Morristown Festival of Books.
Chernow will deliver the keynote talk at the Mayo Performing Arts Center, on Friday, Oct. 13, 2017, according to the festival’s website.
He’ll discuss his newest biography, of Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War hero whose presidency was rocked by scandals.
“This is America’s greatest biographer, bringing movingly to life one of our finest but most underappreciated presidents,” Festival organizers proclaim.
“The definitive biography, Grant is a grand synthesis of painstaking research and literary brilliance that makes sense of all sides of Grant’s life, explaining how this simple Midwesterner could at once be so ordinary and so extraordinary.”
Keynote tickets are $42, and include a signed hardcover copy of Grant. Student admission, at $20, doesn’t include the book.
Lectures by other authors, on Saturday, Oct. 14, are free to the public. Top fiction-, nonfiction and children’s writers will be announced next month.
Grant examines this legendary figure’s business failures, his meteoric rise as Union Army genius and confidant of President Lincoln, and his lifelong battle with alcoholism. While Grant’s inner circle at the White House got mired in controversy, Grant earned praise from Frederick Douglass for opposing the Ku Klux Klan.
MORRISTOWN THREAD
A Morristown thread, however slight, can be found in Chernow’s works.
Ulysses S. Grant was a visitor here, at the home of famed political cartoonist Thomas Nast. (Another Nast guest, Mark Twain, helped Grant publish his memoirs.)
And Alexander Hamilton, while serving as an aide to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War, wooed his future bride in Morristown.
You can bet Chernow will field plenty of questions about that during the Q and A portion of his presentation.
Like Grant, Hamilton was a brilliant but flawed character. “He radiated charm and intelligence,” dazzling everyone who met him, Chernow told the Drew Forum in Madison earlier this year.
A New York Times best-seller in 2004, Alexander Hamilton caught the eye of another character who greatly impressed Chernow: Lin Manuel Miranda.
Miranda could turn “40 pages of the book into four minutes of a song [with] poetic and pleasing music…that breaks the stereotype of rap being cold and misogynistic,” Chernow marveled.
Chernow won the 2015 National Humanities Medal; Washington: A Life won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. The Brooklyn resident took home a National Book Award for his first work, The House of Morgan.
His Hamilton biography earned him the American History Book Prize. Chernow, a past president of PEN America, also has collected eight honorary doctorates.
Prior Festival keynote speakers included Sebastian Junger (Tribe, The Perfect Storm), Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn (A Path Appears), and William Cohan (The Price of Silence).
Last year’s Festival featured 41 top authors and attracted an estimated 6,500 visitors to downtown venues such as the Presbyterian Church, the Morristown & Township Library, the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church and the Jockey Hollow Bar & Kitchen.
An inaugural KidFest, showcasing nine popular children’s writers, was a hit and is scheduled to return.
MORE ABOUT THE 2017 MORRISTOWN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS
MG COVERAGE OF THE 2016 FESTIVAL
