Ron Chernow

American · born 1949

Born Ronald Chernow on March 3, 1949, in Brooklyn, New York, to Israel Chernow, who ran a discount store and later started a small stock brokerage, and Ruth Chernow, a bookkeeper, he grew up in Queens and graduated valedictorian from Forest Hills High School in 1966. He earned a bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Yale University in 1970, then studied English literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge, drifting toward a doctorate he never finished. For most of the 1970s he supported himself as a freelance magazine journalist, publishing dozens of articles on business and finance, before spending the mid 1980s directing financial policy studies at the Twentieth Century Fund, a New York research foundation. He married Valerie Stearn, a professor of languages and social sciences, in 1979. In 1986, with no formal training in economics and no contacts inside Wall Street, he set out to write a history of the J.P. Morgan banking empire built entirely from archives and interviews. The result, The House of Morgan, appeared in 1990 and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. He followed it with The Warburgs in 1993 and a life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. called Titan in 1998, before turning to the American founders with Alexander Hamilton in 2004, the book that inspired Lin Manuel Miranda's musical Hamilton, and Washington: A Life in 2010, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Grant, his life of Ulysses S. Grant, followed in 2017. Valerie died in January 2006. Chernow served as president of PEN American Center beginning in 2006, received the National Humanities Medal in 2015 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal in 2018, and continues to write from New York.