ProloguePROLOGUE When I first met Lin-Manuel Miranda to discuss this project, he was trying to help his four-year-old log on to Disney Plus. It was a clear, wintry day in 2022, and he''d invited me to the Drama Book Shop, a shrine to playwriting in Midtown Manhattan''s theater district that had given him and his friends a basement space after college to work on the show that became his first Broadway musical, In the Heights . Between substitute teaching and dancing at bar mitzvahs to pay his rent, he''d pop down to the bookshop basement and figure out a song on its creaky piano. He now owned the bookshop with one of his earliest collaborators on that show. He pointed out a perk of ownership--"Free coffee!"--when we filled our cups at the café and found a table to chat. But before we did that, he had to help his son crack the Disney app. The little guy wanted to watch Encanto . I had to suppress a laugh.

If anyone should have Disney Plus streaming without a hitch, it ought to be the songwriter who supplied its most beloved content. The Broadway smash Hamilton more or less launched Disney Plus when the show''s live film version was released on the service in 2020, quickly becoming its most-streamed title. Disney''s Encanto , for which Lin-Manuel wrote the songs, was the most-streamed movie in the world in 2022, bested the next year by Disney''s Moana , also with songs by Lin-Manuel. Numbers like "We Don''t Talk About Bruno" and "Surface Pressure" from Encanto became so popular that Billboard named Lin-Manuel its 2022 songwriter of the year, ranked higher even than Taylor Swift. In addition to his multiple Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and the MacArthur "genius grant," Lin-Manuel had arguably created the soundtrack to the post-pandemic world. He redefined musical storytelling by synthesizing his Latino heritage with his love of hip-hop, Broadway, and every other form of pop culture he''d encountered, the rare theater artist to become a household name. And yet that didn''t mean the iPad app worked better for his family than for anyone else''s. It had been a crazy year, Lin-Manuel told me after he''d gotten his son logged on.

With studio release calendars reshuffled by the pandemic, he''d had four movies come out in the past eight months. In addition to Encanto , there was the film version of In the Heights , an animated musical for Sony called Vivo , and his directorial debut on Netflix, a film based on Rent composer Jonathan Larson''s autobiographical musical Tick, Tick. Boom! . Even for an artist who famously writes like he''s running out of time, it was a lot. But now, he said, his calendar was finally clear. He had nothing going on except helping his older son get ready for school. And cowriting a concept album based on the 1979 movie The Warriors . And composing the songs for the Lion King prequel, Mufasa .

And finishing a new musical with one of his composer heroes, John Kander. And polishing the score for a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid with another of his heroes, Alan Menken. And working out a performance with Andrew Lloyd Webber to celebrate the queen''s jubilee. When he talked about these projects, he didn''t seem burdened or overwhelmed. He looked giddy. In a gray overcoat, sweater, and jeans, with a scruffy pandemic goatee, he could barely sit still. After leading me down to the Drama Book Shop basement, he started playing tunes on an old piano, popping up to illustrate dance steps, then whipping out his laptop to show me video clips. Unlike his early days in that basement, he no longer had financial worries.

With the success of Hamilton , he said, he had the freedom to pursue projects that met his main criterion: "I like to work on things I''ll learn from." It was that appetite for learning that had drawn me to Lin-Manuel. As a theater professor and an arts journalist, I''d written about his career before. Trained as a Shakespeare scholar, I wondered who our Shakespeares might be today--artists telling national stories in innovative dramatic forms--and in 2016, the head of New York''s Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, suggested I check out the guy who''d just created a hip-hop musical about the American Revolution. For the New Yorker , I covered the 2017 opening of Hamilton in London, and I traveled to Puerto Rico for the Atlantic in 2019 when Lin-Manuel took Hamilton there on a fundraising tour after Hurricane Maria. I wrote about his contributions to Moana and Mary Poppins Returns --sometimes appreciatively, sometimes critically. And every time I heard him speak, what struck me, besides his exuberance, was his interest in trying things that would help him learn new skills. For a songwriter who''d already found so much success, he seemed almost insatiable in his desire to expand his tool kit.

His collaborators noticed it too. "Lin is the best in the world at what he does because he''s continually challenging himself," Jared Bush, the screenwriter for Moana and Encanto , told me. "He has this constant desire to keep improving, stretching, and learning." And that desire, his longtime friends say, has characterized his approach to creativity for years. "Without diminishing his talent, I don''t think of him as a genius," says Owen Panettieri, his college friend and vice president of Lin-Manuel''s company 5000 Broadway Productions. "It''s a bit of a disservice to say, ''Oh, he''s just brilliant,'' or ''Oh, he has this gift.'' Maybe there''s some truth to that, but I don''t believe that''s the key to his success over decades. If you really want to create art that''s lasting, there''s work and there''s sacrifice, and there''s also a commitment to openness and learning.

He works really hard, and he continues to learn, and that, more than anything, is what helps." Comments like that intrigued me. I wanted to find out what Lin-Manuel had learned. I knew the output; I was curious to figure out the input. And doing so, I suspected, might help me reach a different understanding of creativity. Many of us assume that some people come into the world as inherent creators, and we imagine masterpieces springing, fully formed, from the brains of those unique geniuses. If any work seemed to illustrate that idea, it would surely be Hamilton . Lin-Manuel was the originator, the lyricist, the composer, the scriptwriter, and the star, motoring through brilliant raps on Broadway that changed the way America tells its origin story.

If you encountered Lin-Manuel only as Alexander Hamilton, you might think he was a born genius. And yet I soon learned that was not how most people who knew Lin-Manuel as a child would have described him. Though he had the promise to test into a Manhattan public school for gifted children, he wasn''t considered the best writer in his cohort, or the best composer, or the best musician. He was kind, enthusiastic, smart, and imaginative, and he had charisma onstage, if not particular singing talent. He enjoyed making up songs with his toys, but so do lots of children. Coming up with a ditty like "The Garbage Pail Kids are in town!" in preschool doesn''t guarantee that three decades later you''ll come up with a line like "I''m past patiently waitin''. I''m passionately smashin'' / Every expectation, every action''s an act of creation!" He had to learn how to become an artist. What people did recognize in Lin-Manuel back then was a burning desire to create art and a limitless curiosity about ways to do it better.

He sat up close to his elementary-school bus driver, an aspiring rapper from the Bronx who taught his passengers to repeat bars from early hip-hop groups like the Sugarhill Gang and the Geto Boys. He memorized tracks from his sister''s ''80s cassette tapes so he could lip-synch to them at the school talent show, and he watched Disney animated musicals over and over until he could perform the soundtracks for his classmates. He apprenticed himself to the older high-school students who directed plays and wrote original scripts so he could learn to direct and write as well. And he embraced the messy process of making things--movies, plays, musicals--as stages in his growth rather than referenda on his ability. Masterpieces didn''t turn up in his hands overnight. When it opened in 2015, Hamilton was the eighth musical that the thirty-five-year-old creator had written, if you counted his scripts back through college and high school. Hamilton itself required seven years of development. It took Lin-Manuel a long time to become a genius.

That process of learning to create was also a process of learning to draw on all the different parts of his identity. Lin-Manuel grew up between cultures. Both his parents came to New York from Puerto Rico and raised him and his sister in a largely Spanish-speaking immigrant neighborhood at the northernmost tip of Manhattan. At Lin-Manuel''s elementary school, which drew from communities all over the island, many of his classmates couldn''t pronounce his name. He became Lin at school and Lin-Manuel at home. He spent summers with his grandparents near San Juan, but he didn''t speak Spanish well enough to fit in with the other kids. He was too much of an outsider in Puerto Rico, too Puerto Rican on the Upper East Side. It wasn''t until he got to college that he met other children of the Caribbean diaspora and felt like he didn''t have to code-switch anymore.

It was the late 1990s, the era of the Latin crossover boom in pop music, and for the first time, he tried writing salsa and merengue tunes. He had to learn how to make art that reflected his fully hyphenated self and how to create opportunities for pe.