Thank you, Ron Chernow

Peeling back the onion of American history

Last year, I was riding with a good friend around Atlanta’s Stone Mountain, GA. It’s a fascinating geological formation — a quartz monzonite dome monadnock — but most people know it for the massive Confederate memorial with carvings of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson.

As we rode, we got to talking about the Atlanta Campaign of 1864, which played a pivotal role in Lincoln’s re-election. Sherman’s success in Georgia shifted public opinion, countering war fatigue and solidifying support for Lincoln's wartime policies.

That conversation led us to Ulysses S. Grant — the general who took Chattanooga the prior year and then entrusted Sherman to drive into Georgia while he turned to face Lee in Virginia. History often feels like a game of inches. The world could have spun off in wildly different directions based on the smallest margins.

Which brings me to a man, whose biographies I’ve been reading for more than a decade: Ron Chernow.

Chernow’s biographies have explored the inner lives and broader legacies of some of America’s most influential figures. He began in 1993 with The House of Morgan, then turned to Titan, his biography of John D. Rockefeller. From there, it was natural to turn back further — to Alexander Hamilton, the founding father who architected the financial system that enabled men like Morgan and Rockefeller to rise. That biography, of course, became the basis for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which made America’s founding story a pop culture phenomenon.

Chernow wasn’t done. He then wrote Washington: A Life in 2010 — Washington being the essential Hamilton champion — both in the Revolution and in the 1790s, during his two terms as president.

And in 2017, Chernow turned to another great general — Grant. Unlike his prior subjects — figures who seemed destined from an early age to shape history — Grant, at the age of 40, was heading toward historical obscurity. After fighting in the Mexican-American War, he resigned from the army in disgrace and was scraping by selling firewood in St. Louis.

Then came the Civil War.

Grant’s rise was improbable. His presidency was controversial — marred by scandal, though many historians now view him as honest and tragically poor at reading people. In his final year, broke and dying of esophageal cancer, he was encouraged by Mark Twain to write his memoirs. Grant finished a few days before his death, and Twain considered the final product a literary masterpiece. He published it with terms generous enough to rescue Grant’s family from financial ruin — another moment of small margins in history, where one perons’s belief in another changed the outcome, not only for Grant’s widow, but also for our collective understanding of the Civil War.

All of this is context for Chernow’s latest work, which I’m reading now: his biography of Twain himself — someone he describes as “the conscience of late 19th century America.”

What I love about Chernow’s work is that it’s not just about the people. His biographies are psychological and cultural windows into the times he writes about — full of big swings, big risks, great tragedies, and improbable recoveries. Twain is no exception: creative brilliance, massive growth, and an ending full of loss and bitterness. I haven’t finished the book yet, but I already feel the tension between optimism and pessimism, idealism and pragmatism, luck and timing. All the things that shape our lives, our companies, and our countries.

Thank you, Ron Chernow.