The theater, Moss Hart explained, is the "inevitable refuge of the unhappy child." Hart, one of the most successful playwrights and directors of the 20th century, endured severe poverty in his Bronx childhood before he reached the heights of Broadway success. Once his celebrated autobiography, Act One , had achieved cult status, Hart became the patron saint of the stage-struck; his ghost is one of several that haunt this engaging, often poignant, sometimes wearying memoir of a stage-struck boy, Frank Rich Jr., who eventually (though not in the course of this narrative) took his seat as chief drama critic of The New York Times .

For Frank Rich, as for Moss Hart, the theater was at first "not so much a profession as a disease." In few Broadway chroniclers–not even in his predecessors at The Times , Alexander Woollcott, Brooks Atkinson or Walter Kerr–was the spore of the stage implanted so early. When she was pregnant with baby Frank, Mrs. Rich listened over and over to the original cast recording of South Pacific ; as the baby grew into a toddler and the toddler into a small boy, she opened up scrapbooks pasted with the Playbills and souvenirs of her own childhood theater-going, while Frank's father brought home recordings of The Pajama Game , Peter Pan and Damn Yankees . Until he was 7, Frank was vouchsafed a contented 1950's childhood, "where ignorance really was bliss."

Then his parents separated, his father moved out. Suddenly his family and his home in a sleepy Maryland subdivision vanished as if in an earthquake. He developed elaborate fears: He lived in terror of nightfall and "the darkness of not knowing what was going to happen next." He tried to reunite his parents by acting the part of the perfect boy. At the least sign of frustration, however, he would fly into a rage, punishing his mother with tantrums that subsided only when her resigned withdrawal made him suddenly afraid of losing his one remaining parent.

Like thousands before him, Mr. Rich chose the theater as his escape. It was a good choice. In the provincial Washington, D.C., of Mr. Rich's upbringing–a swampy, un-air-conditioned hick town composed of neighborhoods like the sparsely populated Cleveland Park and the status-conscious "Chanukah Heights"–divorce made Frank a misfit everywhere except the theater.

Bewildered by his parents' second marriages, Frank transplanted himself in fantasy to the brighter world of Broadway. He hoarded Playbills , wore new grooves into original cast albums and scissored the ads and A.B.C.'s from the theater pages of The Times to make simulated marquees on his bedroom bulletin board. His mania was so inexhaustible that, on an early visit to the real Broadway, he dove headfirst into Times Square trash cans–ostensibly to retrieve Playbills from shows he hadn't seen, but really to clown for his mother, who shared and indulged his passion.

Back at home, Frank used his memories of such moments as "a kind of Salk vaccine" to inoculate himself against the mundane Washington of the Senators baseball team, WEAM Top 40 radio, S & H green stamps, D. C. Transit, the Evening Star and a shortage of children in Cleveland Park. The Broadway that Mr. Rich visited as a boy was undergoing a golden age– Bells Are Ringing at the Shubert, The Music Man and later Camelot at the Majestic, My Fair Lady at the Mark Hellinger–but the playhouse that we see most clearly in Ghost Light is the showcase Frank created in a shoebox at home, so that he could stage and relive the shows he'd just seen in New York. His theater had his name on it, Rich's –after the Washington shoe store founded by his great-great-grandfather next to Ford's (yet another theater) four years after Lincoln was shot (100 years later, the store was still in the family, run by his grandfather and father).

By age 14, Frank Rich was a drama critic thinly disguised as a short, fair, blue-eyed boy from the boondocks. Late one night during a binge of Broadway theater-going in 1963, he couldn't resist handing over what amounted to his first notice: He one-upped a fellow stage addict in the shadows of the Majestic Theater. The stranger, waiting to get Mary Martin's autograph, had tried to impress Frank with the news that the legendary producer David Merrick was about to bring a new musical to the St. James. Tough luck–Frank had already seen the musical in its Washington tryout. He'd already read the bad review in Variety , the show business bible, and he'd staked out a contrarian position: "Buy a ticket to Hello, Dolly! in advance," advised the boy who would become known as the Butcher of Broadway. "It's going to be a hit."

Like many aggressive and outspoken people, Mr. Rich insists on seeing himself filtered through the shyness and insecurity his childhood taught him to cover up. As he recounts the incident outside the Majestic, he claims to have startled himself with his own assertiveness. But this was a boy with a subscription not to Boys' Life or Popular Mechanics but to Variety , and it followed him to summer camp so that, in between stagecraft and swimming, he could keep an eye on the week's box-office receipts. This was a boy already well-acquainted with the power of inside information.

Broadway taught Frank a lesson he dreaded: Everything that opens must sooner or later close. But theater magic proved to be so transforming that it turned Mr. Rich's bullying stepfather, Joel Fisher, a high-octane Washington lawyer, into Frank's affectionate champion, then back again. Along with daily tongue-lashings and occasional beatings, Joel provided front-row seats at standing-room-only shows to which not even the Vice President of the United States could get access.

As a high school kid decked out in a newly bought tweed suit, Frank was initiated into box-office mysteries by one of the theater's classical guardians, Scott Kirkpatrick, the eccentric and old-fashioned manager of Washington's National Theater, who hired the teenager as a ticket-taker. At the National, Frank met the man who became his first true theater mentor, Clayton Coots, a company manager who tutored Frank in the ways of extravagant after-theater suppers, offered purportedly Platonic back rubs (accompanied by invitations to share the bed instead of the living-room sofa), and initiated a correspondence laced with tea and sympathy.

Once introduced to the real lives of show people, Frank became a believer in the central mystery of their faith: that each night, in a few combustible moments after dusk, as a company of players and a house full of onlookers magically fuse, they form a family–a family so fantastic yet real that each night, and in the process of its whole run, the life of a show recapitulates the cycle of every family's creation and dissolution. This conception of the theater as a magical place where one's original family is made incarnate and whole once more, where divorce and death are cheated each night (but only as long as the show lasts), is tested and retested throughout Mr. Rich's memoir. Will this new family love him? Is it really any more reliable than the one that broke his heart in the first place? What happens when a play closes? Where does everyone go?

The questions are elementary and existential because Mr. Rich has chosen to limit his field of vision to the peripheries of a boy's life. For almost the entire story, the author's external activities occur well within the bounds of parental sanction and curfew. The stage does more than awe and exhilarate; it empowers him. At a Broadway playhouse, he feels completely in control, especially if he can sit alone. He observes himself watching shows and sees–at first with uncanny perspicuity, then with sad recognition–the links to his own family dramas. In this sense, Ghost Light is more the story of a young man's awakening–a book of anatomized responses–than a traditional theatrical memoir.

The narrow sight lines that the grown-up Mr. Rich has chosen to work inside permit us to see only as far into the world as Frank can see. His troubles at home, however, are the exception. If Act One , written in the buttoned-up 50's, was in part a response to Moss Hart's years of psychoanalysis with Dr. Lawrence Kubie, Ghost Light , written in an age of widespread confession by a man who is now himself the divorced father of two children, brings renewed focus to age-old questions. When Frank was growing up, children with irreconcilable parents were presumed to be better off if their mother and father found happiness with new partners. Smart kids like Frank were supposed to be too sophisticated to let themselves become victims of divorce. Mr. Rich describes with brutal accuracy the day his abusive stepfather destroyed his one remaining illusion: "that I was a boy from a broken home who was not himself broken." The principal ghost in Ghost Light is his parents' brief, fragile happiness, and it is their legacy that Mr. Rich means both to ward off and to honor with the image of a "ghost light," a single bulb left burning center stage in an empty theater so that complete darkness cannot invite a ghost to move in.

In spirit, Ghost Light is a direct descendant of Moss Hart's coming-of-age classic, the inhaling of which was for Frank a crucial rite of passage. But whereas Hart in 1959 wrote a fairy tale that takes the initiate, step by step, away from poverty, through years of perseverance outside the closed stage door and into the heart of a Broadway hit, Mr. Rich remains fixed on the other side of the curtain, his progress marked by ever-more-acute perceptions made from increasingly advantageous seating. From the rear of the house, Ghost Light captures cameos of big-time show people in the midst of the creative process; Jerome Robbins, Irving Berlin, Josh Logan and Zero Mostel are distantly glimpsed, as is a dress rehearsal of Fiddler on the Roof , written by Joe Stein, the father of Mr. Rich's best friend from summer camp. But the inner workings of theatrical production remain unexplored while the author gives unremitting, detailed accounts of what never fails to be, for him, the talismanic ritual of getting theater tickets–even for shows he's already seen.

Act One left you hungry to write a play. Ghost Light , though infused with a love of theater equally intense and contagious, leaves you hoping that one day you'll know someone who can get you good seats to a revival of The Music Man . Or, to put it another way, who grows up wanting to be a drama critic?

Ghost Light leaves its hero at the gates of Harvard Yard. Sharp as he was, as a freshman Mr. Rich didn't see the dream job looming. But the fact that he had already chosen theater as the medium in which to heal himself, and that he later proved to be the American theater's

ideal critic for 13 seasons, is no coincidence. Only someone whose family was vaporized could write as alertly as Mr. Rich did as critic and chronicler during the plague years that devastated the theater, or as sensitively as he does here as a foster child of the theater "family." Better than most, he understands why the theater protects misfits on both sides of the curtain against the darkness that, for a few hours, the brightly lit stage has defeated.

David Michaelis is the author of N. C. Wyeth: A Biography (Knopf) .

The American National Biography is a literary milestone, a kind of Human Genome Project for the advancement of historical understanding. Here, in 24 volumes and 17,453 life sketches, is the DNA of who and what we are as a nation–a candid, decoded mapping of traits that, for good and bad, have shaped the American character.

The ANB is a brand-new rival to the Dictionary of American Biography ( D.A.B. ), which for 72 years has dominated the field of retrospective research. Written by a small circle of historians for a slightly larger target audience of scholars, the D.A.B .'s original 20 volumes were weighted toward the origins and externals of notable lives. The old D.A.B. subordinated characterization to achievement and scrupulously avoided giving offense; touchy hall-of-records information like adoption or birth identity was seldom mentioned, let alone highlighted.

A fresh biographical enterprise prepared by a broader circle of authorities, the ANB is stunningly ambitious; since it was first published last year (with sizable quarterly updates that began appearing online in June at www.anb.org), it has added to our star-spangled Who's Who the previously unmagnified truths of individual lives. Take, for instance, Horatio Alger, creator of an American type–the honest, hardworking boy hero who went "from rags to riches," and who influenced generations of budding entrepreneurs in industrialized post-Civil War America. In the D.A.B. 's sanitized treatment of Alger's personal life, Alger's father, a "rather sanctimonious" Unitarian clergyman, interferes with Alger's earliest plans to marry, although we are not told to whom. The Rev. Alger instead urges his son into the ministry, but not before Alger has spent a year in Paris pursuing "futile indiscretions and equally futile remorse." Again we are kept in the dark, although the article's nearly anonymous author (in the old D.A.B. , historians were known only by their initials) drops hints about Alger's "sickly conscience." Then, on Dec. 8, 1864, Alger gives up teaching and journalism to be ordained as a Unitarian minister. Two years later, he resigns (the tight-lipped D.A.B. notes only that Alger quit his church in Brewster, Mass., and moved to Manhattan)–no reason is given except Alger's desire to "devote himself to literature."

The ANB has no qualms about telling us straight out that Alger was forced to quit the pulpit after being accused of sexually molesting boys in his congregation–a charge Alger did not deny. "For the record," adds Gary Scharnhorst (who happens to be the author of the most complete Alger biography), "there is no evidence Alger repeated his earlier mistakes. After the Brewster imbroglio he was never again publicly accused of pederasty or other sexual impropriety, though by his own admission he 'made friends with hundreds of urchins' over the years."

The difference between the old D.A.B .'s genteel reserve and the ANB 's 21st-century candor is nowhere more obvious than with sexual issues. The ANB opens an entirely new realm of renown with its entry on Christine Jorgensen, whose sex-change operation in the 1950's helped to popularize the word "transsexual" and open a national discussion on gender and sex roles. The closest the D.A.B .'s comprehensive index comes is "Transplants, gonadal"–which points the curious to a medical charlatan of the 1920's who transplanted goat testes into aging farmers duped by the promise of sexual rejuvenation. In its 10 supplements, the last published as recently as 1995, the D.A.B . does give ground to the social upheavals of the sexual revolution. But where the D.A.B . leaves us guessing, the ANB fills in the blanks. For instance, the D.A.B . states that Cole Porter's marriage was childless; the ANB gets to the point: The composer's marriage to the beautiful and rich Linda Lee Thomas "incorporated Porter's homosexuality." The D.A.B. tells us that the personal life of international tennis star Bill Tilden was "complicated" by his sexual orientation; his arrest in November 1946 on charges of "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" emerges only in outline: We aren't told who, where or what–not even the length of his prison sentence. The ANB spells it out: Tilden was found by police "obviously engaged in sexual activity with a 14-year-old boy." The first American to win Wimbledon was then sentenced to a year in prison.

Originally written for a society inhospitable to women, gays, Catholics, Jews and every conceivable hyphenated American, the D.A.B. has remained insufficiently straightforward about delicate subjects like abortion and adoption. In 1917, Polly Adler, a 17-year-old Russian émigrée trying to escape poverty, was raped by her factory supervisor in Brooklyn. According to the ANB , the rape–which resulted in pregnancy, abortion and the loss of her job–proved to be a watershed event in the life of the future brothel-keeper and author. Rape is never mentioned in the D.A.B. 's cosmetic portrait of Ms. Adler. In the Library of Congress, papers from the American Council of Learned Societies, administrator of the original volumes, show that in the D.A.B. 's entry on Frank Buck (the infamous wild-game "explorer" of the 1920's), the secret of Buck's adoption was fudged in the text and kept hidden in the files. Look up a contemporary figure like 1960's political activist Allard Lowenstein, and you learn in the ANB that Lowenstein, who was raised by his stepmother, did not learn the identity of his birth mother until he was 13. The phrase "birth mother" is simply not known in the white-shoe world of the D.A.B.

No wonder librarians are calling the ANB "a godsend." Its well-made volumes are printed with easy-to-read type, and the number of individual biographies has increased by 40 percent over the D.A.B. –that's 7,000 people. For pure entertainment value, the ANB is as absorbing as a complete set of the old Life magazine. Unlike the D.A.B. , it includes foreigners who left their imprint on American life–figures as various as Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean Renoir and Bob Marley. I enjoyed happening across the gritty, pre- Sopranos life of underworld figure Vito Genovese (described as a "criminal entrepreneur"), or discovering that Robert Carl Zuppke, a German-born football coach at the University of Illinois, had a lifelong ambition to be a painter but ended up as one of football's great pioneers, developing such staples of the game as the spiral pass from center (1906), the screen pass (1910), the flea-flicker (1910), the onside kick (1917) and the offensive huddle (1921).

Another ANB innovation is collective biography: the Marx Brothers, the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, the Challenger Shuttle Crew and so on. Thirty First Ladies, including Martha Washington, are at last given their due; only five were accounted for in the D.A.B. The presidential pantheon, meanwhile, contains a gem by Alan Brinkley; his biographical sketch of Franklin D. Roosevelt is a model of a life narrated and interpreted at the same time. And the ANB doesn't just bring old faces to new light; it rounds up and holds the usual subjects–Revolutionary War heroes included–accountable.

John Paul Jones, the aggressive, often unlikable naval officer who never met a war he didn't want to fight, accepted a rear admiral's commission offered by Catherine II of Russia when she waged war on Ottoman Turkey. In St. Petersburg in April 1789, Jones was arrested for the alleged rape of a 10-year-old girl. The D.A.B. airbrushes Jones' part in the incident: The admiral, we learn, was the victim of enemies who "circulated a story that he had violated the person of a young girl." The ANB makes no bones about calling it an alleged rape. The article discusses the case plainly, concluding that history cannot say whether Jones was guilty or framed by his enemies.

When the D.A.B. was first published, unity was the moral of the national story. In our time, diversity has been recognized as America's strength, and the ANB reflects this shift, with its sea-change representation of women and its diligent "all walks of life" panoply: Abolitionists, American Indian Leaders, Birth Control Advocates, Black Nationalists, Forgers, Gurus, Gynecologists, Hawaiian Leaders, Islamic Leaders, Surfers, Swindlers, Zionists, Zoologists. Midwives are included for the first time, mainly thanks to the gifted historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich; and the D.A.B. 's sprinkling of bluestocking feminists and suffragists has been replaced by the ANB 's across-the-board interest in women's lives, not just in its 130 Women's Rights Advocates and 86 Suffragists.

The contrast between the D.A.B. and the ANB is starkest of all when it comes to popular culture. Back in the days when Cleveland Amory's Celebrity Register was an indispensable reference work for the lives ( lifestyles had not yet been discovered) of the rich and famous, the new medium of television was to the movies what the movies had been to the stage a generation earlier. Crossover stars–and the speed with which they ascended–made life difficult for anyone writing about pop culture because even basic information about the screen work of a former "Goldwyn Girl" like Lucille Ball was scarce. D.A.B. could fit all its notable actors and actresses into two categories. Since 1980, however, an entertainment revolution has taken place (nowadays history itself isn't history unless it's entertainment, too), and even broadcast journalists and religious broadcasters and football coaches have become sub-segments in an ever-splitting amoeba of performers that in the ANB includes 624 Stage and Screen Actors, 92 Radio and Television Personalities, 59 Comedians, 11 Minstrel Show Performers, 2 Monologists, 57 Vaudeville Performers, 11 Cowboys, 4 Clowns, and 2 Ventriloquists, to say nothing of additional crossover worlds in music, dance and art. So far there are no overlaps with Presidents of the United States, but only because Ronald Reagan still lives.

The more consequential revolution–information–is reflected in ANB Online , a fully searchable Web site (when technical difficulties and slipshod technical support haven't sabotaged your research); the site includes the text of the entire ANB , plus 500 new articles each year, for an annual subscriber fee of $250. The new articles, posted quarterly, include those figures missing from the original print edition, as well as notables who have died since the end of 1995 (which is as far as the original 24 volumes take you).

A cyber-speed pantheon will take some getting used to. I found it shocking, for example, to read Murray Kempton's life when I feel as though I was just reading Kempton's column the day before yesterday. Sonny Bono, almost forgotten, reborn as a popular Congressman, now also belongs to the ages. And Florence Griffith-Joyner–how can Flo-Jo be here with Jesse Owens and Jim Thorpe, already at the finish line? Illustrated in some cases with photographs (an invaluable innovation), hyperlinked, cross-referenced and searchable by theme, this up-to-the-minute national portrait gallery makes the old D.A.B. look as lifeless as Madame Tussaud's.

The D.A.B. could be doomed. Its tendency to nod acceptance of received opinion, coupled with its embargo on the kind of human weakness that has often shaped great lives, makes its large, stately volumes seem smaller and less useful by the day. Its once-exemplary foreshortening of the merely personal in public lives ended up protecting only the profession it intended to serve. Society itself sooner or later always catches on to the real story.

What will make the ANB last? Permanence is not merely a function of candor, after all. In America, telling the truth is itself a fad. Our demand for honesty in national life varies from decade to decade–and now from poll to poll. At the moment, the ANB 's greatest achievement is the vitality and reach of its voice, a richness and accuracy of language that makes us want to know more about lives as they were really lived in their own time, before hindsight and history impose a false waxiness. As a credible expression of the multi-helix American genetic code, the ANB will find no equal in documentary prose for years to come. It reminds us what it means to have one life to live.

The English excel at writing brief lives, a pocket-size genre long on style, short on facts. Invented by the second-century Roman historian Suetonius ( Lives of the Caesars ), aped by John Aubrey as an alternative to 17th-century dinner-party gossip, epitomized by Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) and David Cecil's Two Quiet Lives (1948), recently perfected by Richard Holmes ( Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage )–the biographical sketch has fared poorly in America. We like our biographies the same size as our prizefighters, our Westerns, our cars: big and sweeping, like the country itself.

But does anyone really finish them–those meaty, meticulously researched, definitive studies based on thousands of pages of never-before-released documents, hundreds of interviews and complete access to voluminous and revealing papers? The critic and novelist Edmund Wilson summarized what biographers often forget: "It is important in writing a biography to remember that you are telling a story, and the problems of presenting the material are in many ways just the same as those of presenting a subject in fiction." Or, to borrow A&E Biography 's more concise reminder: "Every life has a story."

In the past 18 months, the smart new Penguin Lives series, edited by James Atlas, has succeeded in providing an authoritative short-form alternative to often unreadable 800-plus-page tomes. With six titles appearing each year (few run to more than 160 pages), the series pairs highly esteemed contemporary writers with major figures who have shaped European, Asian and North American culture. Career biographers have no edge here. Of the 10 titles already published, novelists have written six.

The Don King genius of Penguin Lives is in the heavyweight matchups: Garry Wills takes on Saint Augustine, Larry McMurtry faces Crazy Horse, Edmund White versus Marcel Proust. These thrillers, going into eight or nine printings, have drawn a big gate; Saint Augustine and Crazy Horse were best sellers. And if fans quibble with the fight card (I would have liked to see Ian Frazier matched with Crazy Horse; Andrea Barrett with Charles Darwin; and Sidney Blumenthal with Niccolò Machiavelli), we marvel most at the compatibility, the lack of strain, the naturalness of finding Louis Auchincloss coupled with Woodrow Wilson, Mary Gordon yoked to Joan of Arc, Edna O'Brien clapped together with her fellow Irish novelist James Joyce.

Fresh characterization and swift storytelling with no loss of erudition are the series' signatures. Scholarly apparatus encumbers almost none of the compact, handsomely designed volumes. Instead of footnotes, Penguin Lives are salted with the kind of intuitive leaps and historical imagination that work magic in biography. Brevity, meanwhile, has encouraged experimentation. Freed from the wide-ranging duties of the "all-knowing" scholar, Peter Gay can focus on Mozart's revealing confrontations with his father. Excused from cataloguing the vast versatility of Leonardo da Vinci's genius, the Yale physician Sherwin Nuland brings new attention to the master's prescient anatomical observations. Mary Gordon's duties do not include reading all 20,000 books on Joan of Arc in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; she is at liberty to meditate on a young French girl's divinely sent voices.

In the series' latest pairing, Elizabeth Hardwick, the novelist ( Sleepless Nights ) and critic ( Bartleby in Manhattan ), headlines with Herman Melville. As with Jonathan Spence's Mao Zedong or Mr. Wills' Saint Augustine , you won't find a better written, more finely distilled introduction to a vast and complicated subject.

The Melville industry is scarily bulky. Since the 1920's, when novelists and intellectuals like D.H. Lawrence, Lewis Mumford, E.M. Forster and Carl Van Doren reclaimed Moby-Dick from the depths of obscurity, Melville has become the American Shakespeare. When academics stopped counting in 1980, Melville's life and work had attracted no fewer than 531 doctoral dissertations. In one recent biography, the selected bibliography topped 140 titles, shortened from 400. The most thorough narrative of Melville's life, published in 1996, runs to 883 pages, and it only covers the first 32 years–for the last 40 (almost half of which the author spent as a $4-a-day clerk in the Custom House on the New York waterfront), you'll have to wait for volume two.

The facts of Melville's life make a fascinating yarn. He was born into an old upstate Dutch family that went bankrupt. From age 12 he worked as a clerk to help bring the family out of poverty. Growing rebellious, he ran away to sea. In the Pacific, he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, where he lived for several weeks among the Typees. The story of his being held "prisoner" by a supposedly cannibalistic tribe turned Typee , as he called his first novel, into a best seller. The book's candid descriptions of naked South Seas women and its atmosphere of "lazy, tropical, amorousness" launched Melville as America's first literary sex symbol and one of the highest-paid authors of the day. Four popular novels, based on Melville's seafaring adventures, appeared in rapid succession: Omoo , Mardi , Redburn and White-Jacket . He was 30 when he sat down to write his masterpiece, Moby-Dick , which was published a year later to mixed reviews. On Nov. 20, 1851, The New York Observer pronounced it a "complete exhibition of the art and mystery of whaleology" and declared that the "peculiar tact of Melville appears on every page." The novel sold 2,300 copies in its first 18 months, then faded quickly. The books that followed–two novels, a collection of short stories, four books of poetry and a novella–never put him back into the winner's circle.

Exasperated by failure, half-mad with the cost of trying to write and lecture his way out of debt, Melville gave up writing, having published 10 works of fiction in 11 years. He sold his beloved farm in the Berkshires, moved his wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville, and their children back to Manhattan, and slipped into a literary eclipse so total that when he died at age 72 he was remembered in a three-line obituary in The New York Times as "the late Henry Melville."

When we contemplate Melville's life, we are tempted, as Ms. Hardwick notes, to think poor Melville . "There is a forlorn accent shadowing the great energy of his thought and imagination," she writes. "There is a rueful dignity in his life and personal manner, and sometimes a startling abandonment of propriety on the pages." Which to choose, therefore: The life or the work? It's an act of daring to take on either, let alone both, in just 155 pages. Ms. Hardwick chooses the work. Moving from book to book, she patches the minimum of biographical quilting on top of intelligent and brilliantly proportional set pieces on Melville's novels. Attention, English majors: These are the classiest Cliffs Notes you'll ever find on Moby-Dick and Billy Budd .

Ms. Hardwick is a trustworthy, elegant critic with innumerable intellectual gifts and years of experience toiling in the American literary landscape. At the simplest level, her writing is a pleasure to read because of her exquisite fidelity to the spirit of Melville; she writes up to her subject not down to her reader. She never falls into the trap of diminishing the work by unmasking the artist's personal weaknesses and failings.

Sensitive reading is the creative source of her scholarship. She reads with a tender, sympathetic eye, which gives her writing the kind of sightedness one has in dreams: Atmosphere is acutely felt even when the facts are hazy. Ms. Hardwick does not know, for example, why Melville traded his Pittsfield farm for 104 East 26th Street. But she can picture the ramshackle Arrowhead from its owner's window: "Years in the countryside have as many chores as beauties. Outside your window there is the late unmown grass as well as the tall New England trees. There is a miserable little stack of logs waiting to be replenished for the baking oven and the winter bedrooms. A garden is a grave, as Emerson said."

Ms. Hardwick is on the right track–the only track. Outside of his own pages, Melville remains unknowable. His life's record is so much a matter of " seems to be , may have been , and perhaps " that Ms. Hardwick is forced to conclude that Melville "earned the mystery of his inner life." We know that his chronology spans the years when the still-young American imagination could remember its Puritan origins between the great sea and the old forest. As a young man, Melville escaped Protestant America by way of the sea and came back with sunlit tales to tell and sell. In the darker second half of his life he lived like a man struggling to find his way out of a forest. In the end he withdrew, leaving behind a bread-crumb trail of pages.

Long or short, Melville's biography is finally more Jamesian than Melvillian, an inscrutable puzzle in which a man's art flickers candlelight on the sea log of his days, the cabin fever of his nights.

In 1987, Simon Schama's English publisher proposed that he write an account of the French Revolution to coincide with the 1989 bicentennial. Mr. Schama, London-born, Cambridge-educated, had for 20 years been a Dutch historian, interpreting the golden age of the Netherlands through the adjoining windows of painting and history. He had just finished his second book on Dutch culture, The Embarrassment of Riches , and was intrigued by the idea of returning to an earlier interest in French history; yet he demurred.

His publisher challenged him: "Supposing you had an aunt who knew nothing about the French Revolution … and wanted a history as a great story. What would you give her?"

It was time for the professor to follow his own advice. Ever since he arrived at Harvard University in 1978, Mr. Schama had been urging his fellow historians to write history as a story. In 1989, he produced Citizens , a dazzlingly descriptive, densely layered narrative that introduced his "aunt," the Book-of-the-Month Club and hundreds of thousands of readers to the story of how the violence and bloodshed of 1789 actually deprived France and its citizens of the very freedoms that the revolution was supposed to ensure.

Telling history instead of arguing it has turned Mr. Schama's academically minded critics against him. The best-selling author has taken his licks for stooping to "low journalistic devices" in order to keep the reader turning pages. But presenting history as art rather than science has given Mr. Schama, who is now a professor of history and art history at Columbia University, an international audience and a cause. "History without imagination," he insists, "is just so much data processing of the dead."

In his new biography of the Dutch master, Rembrandt van Rijn, Mr. Schama starts off his story in the middle of the action: For more than a decade, when he was in his 20's and 30's, Rembrandt, an ingenious but not yet fully formed painter, measured himself against Peter Paul Rubens, the older, world-renowned "prince of painters and the painter of princes." Rivalry, of course, is not news in biographies of artists. Much of the history of art, down to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in our own time, has been written by interdependent pairs like Michelangelo and Raphael, Bernini and Borromini. For Rembrandt, the doubling was compulsive. His development as an artist was marked by multiple rivalries with fellow Dutch painters. But by Rubens he was haunted. He went so far as to superimpose his own face on the Flemish master's self-portrait in order to see what it would be like to be Rubens. "To become singular," Mr. Schama explains, "Rembrandt had first to become someone's double."

This is a good premise for a story, as Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson long ago discovered. If The Prince and the Pauper is the classic story of one identity in two bodies, then Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sums up the horror of two identities in one body. In Mr. Schama's Conradian tale of Rembrandt as Rubens' "secret sharer," the artist must find his own identity by merging with a double and then fighting to show how different he really is in life and art. The consequences of doubling create the story's suspense. Which of the "twins" will survive? Who will come out on top?

Mr. Schama's other specialty is to bring the historical moment into sharp, immediate focus. He sets scenes on a grand scale. His opening views of Leiden, Rembrandt's hometown, and of Amsterdam, where the young prodigy moved to seek his fortune in 1631, are the prose equivalent of David Lean's wide-screen establishing shots. Approaching Leiden from a distance, those tiny spots far across the low-lying boggy fields gradually resolve into windmills, which grow in size and sound and threat as Mr. Schama draws in closer and closer. Given just enough history to establish the military and political and economic significance of these crude octagonal structures, we are then brought into the social ostracism that set the millers in those windmills apart. Finally, we track into the windmill run by one Roelof Gerritszoon, the son of a miller and the great-grandfather of Rembrandt.

Mr. Schama's prose is never less than energetic. He joyrides through portraits and history paintings, nudes and landscapes, tossing off analysis that links art to social history, politics, law, science and engineering. An unrepentant showoff, he is besotted with his own vocabulary. No one has had this much fun with "valetudinarian," "winkle," "tapsters," "lichenous" and "scrofulous" since William F. Buckley Jr. stopped writing about transoceanic sailing for William Shawn's New Yorker . At the same time, the book is overdecorated. Though the stink of rats and bad cheese can bring us sharply into a 17th-century Dutch scene, Mr. Schama too often distracts himself by becoming the collector and cataloguer of the baroque.

But superabundant powers of description are indispensable to the study of an artist who warned visitors to his studio: "The smell of the colors will bother you." With those colors Rembrandt compiled a startlingly candid inventory of humanness–and let harsh light fall on his own flaws as well. Alone among 17th-century painters of the human figure, Rembrandt showed men and women not as idealized Renaissance forms or muscled, regulation-size Classical figures, but as real people in whom shades of feeling and bodily decay could be seen and felt. Fleshy artifice was Rubens' trademark; the natural, inward-gazing energy of Rembrandt's portraits and self-portraits was something new in the 17th century. Even Rembrandt's history painting was stubbornly personal, his biblical scenes human more than sacred. Mr. Schama sums it up neatly: Rembrandt was "less interested in finding the god in the man than the man in the god."

In a biography keyed to a consuming rivalry, selection is everything; by being all-inclusive with either protagonist, the author ends up failing both. Exclusion and focus are especially necessary in a tale where so many paintings must be presented in the text. Every event, every painting that does not contribute to the solution of the merged pair will seem inorganic to the story. But no sooner has Mr. Schama started us off with Rembrandt's obsession with Rubens, pausing effectively to pit one man's painterly treatment of a subject against the other's, or to decode an etching whose line of thought parallels the story line, than he abandons his plot to a series of shapeless digressions. The reader has pushed through 30 dense pages of Mr. Schama's initial 150-page excursion into the life of Rubens when the thought occurs that we are getting most of Rubens' father's life before even a glimpse of Rembrandt's childhood.

Instead of crosscutting between stories so that parallel developments transilluminate both lives, we find ourselves tunneling into two separate chronicles. The development of Rubens' early life in Antwerp and early vocation in Rome and Mantua sags under the weight and welter of Mr. Schama's exhaustive inquiries. We perk up at the farcical mishaps that befall the 25-year-old Rubens as he hurries around the continent, doing the bidding of bullying princes, currying favor at the Vatican–a portrait of the artist as a young suck-up. The sustained narrative of Rubens' disastrous embassy to Spain, with its rain-soaked gifts, ruined canvasses, damaged vases and worn-out bay horses, is among the best of this 750-page book's often cumbersome set pieces.

The Rembrandt story should pace this narrative. Not only was his art superior in humanity to his rival's, his life was the messier and more interesting. His beloved wife, Saskia, died of tuberculosis in 1642. He went bankrupt in 1656. Six years later, he was still so hard up he had to sell his wife's grave. In 1668, he lost his only son, Titus, to plague. Where Rubens remained always cool, nonchalant, self-contained, Rembrandt was urgent, self-examining, perpetually uncompleted.

Four hundred and some-odd pages and 187 illustrations into this lavishly pictorial story, the reader is astonished to learn that our antagonists will never meet. Even in 1635, when Rembrandt is the most important painter in Amsterdam and Rubens arrives to help negotiate peace between Flanders and the Netherlands, the two pass like proverbial ships in the night. But that's history, like it or not.

Mr. Schama stretches truth not at all when he asks us to believe that the book's core relationship took place on canvas and in Rembrandt's mind, but that it was nonetheless as

real "as if the two artists were sharing studio space." The narcissistic need, in Gore Vidal's words, to "be myself twice," does not require the physical presence of a double. It's enough to know that he or she is out there, mirroring. For readers, however, the absence of a face-to-face, eye-to-eye encounter between Rubens and Rembrandt brings a note of anticlimax to this overlong "doubled" narrative. Mr. Schama tries to console his audience by asserting that Rubens' death in 1640 was the crucial event that finally freed Rembrandt to be himself, but this I don't entirely believe.

Stingy Rubens granted the world only four self-portraits, as compared with the blood, sweat and Guinness Book numbers that accrue to Rembrandt's lifelong contests with head and heart. Rubens, always self-controlled, the very model of perfection, never managed to step outside the circle of his own greatness. He was always the "one and only Rubens." Rembrandt, early on, found the way to become everyman. When painting a beggar, the Dutch artist was not satisfied to stand aside and observe objectively; he stepped into the picture and became the beggar. By merging with his subjects, and through them, with us, Rembrandt constructed an art that was universal and lasting. Moreover, by taking art away from the princes and the popes (the same patrons who bedeviled Rubens) and giving it back to the artist, Rembrandt invented the modern art market–all before Rubens' death.

Of the two, Rubens is the one we all start out wanting to be. Rembrandt is who we are. We complete his circle and he ours. By sharing a narrative whose painterly gaze dissolves a life's work back into the lives from which it sprang, Mr. Schama gives back to scholars, students and his grateful public a sentient, feeling Rembrandt.

The big story with Eleanor Roosevelt was change. She began as a sheltered Hudson River Valley aristocrat and ended up a radical world citizen, the universally respected "First Lady of the World." As the 20th century's most influential woman, a selfless advocate of outcasts everywhere, she championed change itself as a force for good in the world.

As with all great reformers, it took Eleanor Roosevelt a long time to figure out who she was and where she fit in. Like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, she learned to use the force of discrimination experienced first hand–caste and race in the case of Gandhi and King, gender and class in hers–to throw society, jujitsu-style, off balance. Like Robert F. Kennedy, she was the trusted eyes and ears and moral muscle to an extravagantly charming and often aloof President. But what makes Eleanor Roosevelt an ideal and inexhaustible subject for biography is that each time her life demanded that she transcend herself in order to move ahead, she risked everything. Abraham Lincoln may be democracy's only other indispensable apostle of change whose personal growth contains as many purifying metamorphoses.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt first had to rescue herself from, as she termed it, an "odd sort of childhood." She was the neglected Ugly Duckling of tragic though beloved parents, both of whom she lost (her mother, a New York Livingston, to diphtheria; her father, an Oyster Bay Roosevelt, to alcoholism) by the time she was 9. Eleanor married in 1905, at age 20, her exuberant fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose mother bullied the inexperienced young Eleanor throughout their early marriage.

It took Eleanor 13 years to shed the role of overpowered wife and timid mother and become the equal of her husband in deciding how she would live her life and where and with whom. At two turning points in her foundering marriage–the discovery in 1918 of Franklin's infidelity (with her social secretary) and the onset in August 1921 of his affliction with polio–she remained loyal to her husband not out of forgiveness or pity or love alone, but out of self-reliance and the reciprocal devotion of an ever-growing circle of women she met through political and social work.

Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt's most complete and searching biographer, continues the saga she began in an award-winning first volume, taking six jam-packed years, 1933 to 1938, to frame her minutely detailed portrait of the transfiguration of Eleanor into E.R. In this second of three (more likely four) intended volumes, the first of which brought a reluctant 48-year-old Eleanor to the White House, we learn that she had reason in 1933 to be apprehensive at the prospect of losing the personal and political independence she had gained in the 1920's.

When the new First Lady (the title itself would not enter colloquial use until 1934) arrived at the White House, her one assignment, Ms. Cook notes, was to "create a gracious and pleasant environment." Until E.R., the doings of Presidents' wives went mostly unrecorded, a convention dating back to Mason Locke Weems' declaration that examining the details of Martha Washington's life was "contrary to the rules of biography." E.R. would be the first First Lady whom history could not subordinate. In addition to her official East Wing duties, she immediately laid claim not just to an unprecedented public life adjacent to her husband's but also a private life of her own.

As "eyes and ears," the Mrs. Roosevelt of legend served the New Deal in a powerful, independent role. Out in front of F.D.R. on practically every important issue of the Depression and prewar years, from civil rights to America's entrance into the World Court, E.R. suffered well-known agonies of frustration as the goad and conscience of the Roosevelt Administration. In scene after scene, as the President torpedoed the London Economic Conference of 1933 and kept silent on the Wagner-Costigan anti-lynching bill of 1934 and remained indifferent to Fascist atrocities in Ethiopia and the Loyalist government in Spain, Ms. Cook shows how the Roosevelts' complex interdependence influenced policy, with E.R. weathering compromises to push the President a little further next time. Always anticipating the next move in every fight, Eleanor little by little propelled Franklin–and the electorate–toward the future. We can now see that intuitive E.R., even more than practical F.D.R., drew the lines on the map of things to come.

Initially, both Roosevelts were silent on Nazi Germany. In 1933, F.D.R. offered no response to urgent appeals from abroad to address Germany's "ferocious anti-Semitism and fanatical racism." The following year, in an episode that was fully reported at the time but has been omitted ever since by F.D.R.'s biographers, the President sent a celebratory "greeting" to a rally at Madison Square Garden sponsored by the "Friends of the New Germany." In a hall draped with swastikas, Nazi bunting and the Stars and Stripes, F.D.R.'s message was read aloud and given three "heils" by 20,000 cheering German-Americans. Ms. Cook meanwhile puzzles over E.R.'s restraint in the face of vivid reports of the Nazis' anti-Jewish violence sent by Americans visiting Berlin. Anti-Semitism tainted Eleanor's youthful letters, but Ms. Cook blames E.R.'s uncharacteristic White House silence on the Administration's isolationism and the connivance of F.D.R.'s State Department, which was intent on squashing any American voice raised against Germany.

Ms. Cook has restored the balance lacking in our understanding of the parallel administration run by the First Lady on issues of public housing, racial integration, women's issues and internationalism. She has also broken new ground in the ongoing excavation of the separate lives led by Eleanor and Franklin. Some of E.R.'s independence and confidence as First Lady came from the relationship she formed in 1932 with 38-year-old Lorena Hickok, a veteran Associated Press reporter, the most highly regarded female journalist in the country. To judge by the surviving evidence of a massive, amorous correspondence stretching across three decades, the intimacy of E.R. and Hick, as she was known, was based on mutual respect, understanding, trust–and sex.

Earlier accounts insist, with a weird Alice-in-Wonderland logic, that the emotional and physical bond between First Lady and First Friend must be seen as a desperate or obsessive "substitute" for another, supposedly more realistic kind of love that was missing from Hick and Eleanor's lives. Nonsense. Ms. Cook has once again coaxed scholarship out of the rabbit hole and back to reality. True, letters do not tell the whole story, and no one except the correspondents can say with absolute certainty how far and in what ways the relationship developed. But Ms. Cook's scrupulous, forceful, fully rounded portrait of two women in love is amply convincing.

Ms. Cook's narrative loses focus, however, when she strays, led on by her own painstakingly inclusive research, into mirrored celebration of feminist milestones. E.R.'s official appreciation of women's breakthroughs is significant–for example, she sponsored musical receptions in the East Room of the White House to honor the composer Amy Beach's contribution to American music. But do we need a list of "other women composers" who "also gave concerts"? Ms. Cook's otherwise compelling story of one woman's life takes on the solemn sound of an almanac of all women–correct, admirable, lifeless.

Cavils aside, the completed volumes of Ms. Cook's Eleanor Roosevelt will surely become the standard reference. More immediately, Volume 2 may serve as a field manual for New York's next Senate race: It maps out strategy and tactics against which the Republicans may have to run. As Mrs. Roosevelt's truest successor in the art of presidential partnership, Hillary Clinton has already mastered the first lesson by accruing power from a husband's philandering, whether with a Lucy Mercer or a Monica Lewinsky: Don't play the victim, win respect as he loses his. A second E.R. lesson that a female politician must bring to the total war of New York politics: Winning admiration is still not as effective as inspiring fear. The third, manifestly most important of Mrs. Roosevelt's precepts, has so far been the toughest for Mrs. Clinton: Win or lose, risk everything. The First Lady of the World learned it the old-fashioned way, not from opinion polls but from life itself.

As Information Age speculation remakes American wealth on a scale not seen since J. Pierpont Morgan strutted onto the world banking stage, the lives of our founding financiers are undergoing necessary rehabilitation. Last year's Titan , Ron Chernow's life of John D. Rockefeller, demonstrated that a monumental saga of a homespun outsider–"mega-billionaire nerd" would be today's Gatesian analog–is still one of our meritocracy's favorite bedtime stories. The life of Pierpont Morgan is an even more fabulous tale. Once upon a time, it might have been dreamed up by the F. Scott Fitzgerald of "The Rich Boy," the worldly storyteller who always wrote best through the eyes of a Midwesterner drawn East as to the realm of Midas.

Morgan literally turned America to gold, saving the gold standard in 1895, and regulating the flow of gold in and out of the United States. He commanded a banking empire that was global in scope; the depth and magnitude of its resources remain unparalleled in modern times. At home, Morgan acted as a one-man central bank, more than once saving the United States from bankruptcy and panic. Consolidating competing companies into vast "combines" in a process that came to be known as "Morganization," he helped to build the foundation on which the American industrial pyramid was raised. Even his nose, ruptured by a chronic skin disorder, was declared by Morgan to be "part of the American business structure."

For all his wealth, he would have looked down that nose at a diamond as big as the Ritz. He typified an age when character was everything. Trusted by kings and nations all over the world, he ruled by force of character. His word was the gold standard, and he knew the power of silence. Morgan rarely gave interviews or speeches. His last will expressed his doctrinal belief in atonement through Christ's sacrifice, yet elicited disbelieving headlines: "Morgan Gives Soul to Maker, Money to Son." For years after his death, no collection of letters surfaced. He left no published works. He hid from history. A consummate New Yorker, however, he continued to make eye contact.

All through the 20th century, novelists have looked into Morgan's "small black magpie's eyes"–the phrase is from John Dos Passos' 1919 . In Ragtime , E.L. Doctorow depicted Morgan with "eyes set just close enough to suggest the psychopathology of his will." At century's end, the J.P. Morgan that we still picture–the glowering trust king, his blighted nose airbrushed, the hard black eyes pricked by light, an aquiline claw choking the polished arm of his chair–comes to us from an image captured in 1903. The 24-year-old Edward Steichen, given two minutes to make a photograph for Morgan's official portrait painter, took several exposures that duplicated the official pose, then suggested that Morgan "swing" his head into a casual pose. Morgan refused. Defiant, he squared off with Steichen, stared down his opponent, and voilà –there sat the real "Napoleon of Wall Street," a sinister icon of the Gilded Age.

Several other J.P. Morgans remain visible around town. A saintly Morgan surfaces in his rare book and manuscript collections, art collections, institutional philanthropy, and high church Episcopal faith–all still on view in the white marble Pierpont Morgan Library on East 36th Street, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where Morgan was president) and the ivy-covered St. George's Church on Stuyvesant Square (where he was senior warden). As the marquee player in Ron Chernow's award-winning history, House of Morgan , Morgan reappeared in 1990 as a restless, conflicted giant: straitlaced yet sybaritic; theatrical but schooled in concealment; tenderhearted in his love for his doomed first wife, cruel to the long-lived second Mrs. Morgan; puritanical in his standards, fatally attracted to sassy showgirls. In short, a sacred monster.

The Morgan that Jean Strouse has brought to life in her masterful, long-awaited biography is deeply human, the most intricate and integrated portrait we have yet had. This Morgan is stripped of varnish but remains grandly scaled and exquisitely rendered. Ms. Strouse, a gutsy, sympathetic writer, whose first biography, Alice James , turned the neglected diarist and remarkable younger sister of William and Henry James into an unexpectedly complex figure, has produced an equally brilliant work with a vastly more intimidating subject.

Morgan has frustrated no fewer than 11 biographers. In Ms. Strouse he has met his match. By measuring her commitment to Morgan in decades, she has made herself into much more than a mere expert on a mythic American financier or a talking head on international finance. As with Alice James, she has created a living relationship with her subject.

An exemplar in American biography, Ms. Strouse sees deeply into the forest by chopping down every tree. She mills the lumber by hand and searches the grain in the wood for the hidden history it reveals. She writes from the inside out, seeing her character's choices and alternatives as they saw them. In the process, her judgment is honed razor-sharp: She alone can reject legends and spurious anecdotes that other Morgan biographers have fallen for, because she alone knows every leaf in the forest.

Working archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Ms. Strouse uncovered significant new evidence about Morgan's public and private lives. In the inner sanctum of the Morgan Library, she dusted off Morgan's childhood diaries and adult letters and business correspondence–a trove that had been seen and used selectively only by Morgan's authorized biographer, a son-in-law. But the Morgan that Ms. Strouse had at first thought she was looking for–"a modified, human-scale version" of the villain in Steichen's portrait–failed to appear. To make matters worse, as she sifted through the testimony of those who had known Morgan, she found his critics more persuasive, better speakers and writers, than his advocates, who seemed "defensive and fawning."

At that point, five years into the work, a more commercial biographer might have gone ahead and fit the evidence to a pre-emptively conceived characterization. Ms. Strouse, however, dumped her first draft and hunkered down to re-examine the Morgan she had encountered in the archives, a Morgan who was "sociable and shy, deliberate and impulsive, ingenuous and shrewd, domineering and flexible, exuberant and depressive, extravagant and frugal, worldly and religious, inscrutably reserved and deeply sentimental." In short, a man.

The complex process of Ms. Strouse's off-page responses is important to note because, although unseen, it gives her storytelling the richness and penetration of a novel. Ms. Strouse was ideally prepared to understand the hypochondria of the "most powerful man of the late 19th century"–her previous experience, after all, was with a "powerless female invalid in a family of intellectuals." Surprisingly, Morgan fell apart almost as frequently as Alice James did; and Ms. Strouse is expert at detecting the real reasons behind Victorian breakdowns for which no organic cause has been found. She traces the internal logic of Morgan's lifelong battles with depression, anxiety, abandonment and "astringent perfectionism," and her efforts make this a groundbreaking interpretation.

But the most remarkable feat in Morgan is the way Alice James' biographer has successfully recast herself as an economic historian. After the Civil War, when the American economy exploded, J.P. Morgan was both supplying the dynamite and steadying the ground. No one did more to transform the rural agrarian republic into a modern industrial empire. As she tells this story, at each crucial step in the national metamorphosis, Ms. Strouse salts her narrative with brisk, clear analysis of the economic principles that were shaping Morgan's public actions. Her chapter on the panic of 1907 could serve as a model of suspenseful storytelling or an introduction to modern economics.

Her mastery of detail allows her to use previously overlooked nuggets to help us understand what money meant to a man of unlimited wealth. We know, for example, that Morgan paid $300 to send a substitute to the Civil War. But what exactly did $300 signify to him in 1863? Poring over the account books from J. Pierpont Morgan & Company, Ms. Strouse noticed what Morgan spent on cigars for himself and his father in 1863: $300.

Morgan was scoured by doubts all his life, yet he ignored his critics, starting with his parents and teachers and ending with the American public. That hubris, Ms. Strouse reveals, lies closer to the root of his real isolation than the unreality of his wealth. During the acute nervous collapse that followed Morgan's testimony before the Pujo Committee in 1912, which led, ultimately, to his decline the following year, the great emperor of money found himself reduced to a state of "childlike dependence." Rumors of Morgan's breakdown in Egypt and subsequent "nerve storms" in Rome caused jitters on Wall Street.

When death finally came, it was caused most likely by a series of small strokes he had already suffered on the Nile, followed by the coup de grâce in Rome. True to form, however, Ms. Strouse has dug up a certificate filed by Italian authorities, stating that Morgan died of "psychic dyspepsia," a nicely Jamesian ending to the story of the Ozymandian banker whose death closed out the 19th century and whose life reopens our eyes to the creation of modern America.

On April 10, 1836, at the age of 23, Helen Jewett was hatcheted to death in the brothel bed where she had made her living in Manhattan's Fifth Ward. The man with whom she had spent the night was missing and a fire had been set to consume her corpse. The press coverage of the sensational whodunit murder created a new style of sex-and-death journalism that comes down to us today in Hard Copy America direct from the bloody bed at 41 Thomas Street. The criminal trial that followed the indictment of Richard P. Robinson, a 19-year-old clerk, became a five-day spectacle, an ur-O.J. media circus that ended, as in our own time, by profoundly dividing public opinion.

Jewett's brutal murder became a national weathervane in part because it coincided with a mass phenomenon: the decay of the farm and the rise of the factory, with the resulting migration of farm boys and girls seeking their fortune in the big cities. At the same time, a new "penny" press was emerging that upped circulation by capitalizing on public fears about unchaperoned youths "falling into sin." The Jewett murder case pitted its victim, an intelligent, accomplished but "fallen" young servant girl from rural Maine, against a handsome, articulate, "respectable" clerk whose father sat in the Connecticut legislature.

Robinson's crime turned the hidden world of New York's sex trade inside out, and once it had been exposed to scrutiny, no one knew how to look at the murder for the atrocity it was. Instead, the Jewett case was sold to the public as a class story and as a morality tale, the mystery of which, according to Patricia Cline Cohen, was heightened by the "presumed incongruity of a person of reputable character committing a murder."

For us, the Jewett case serves as an historical window through which an era can be viewed whole. Yet even as one begins this fascinating interpretive biography, one wonders how far the author can go when her subject is an obscure 19th-century figure in whose short, doomed life only one unforgettable thing happened. The answer is: as far as there is evidence to inspect with new eyes. Biography, as David McCullough says, "isn't one subject. It's a thousand subjects."

Ms. Cohen, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has penetrated deeply into the meaning of Jewett's life and death by tapping scores of related subjects. The author's primary sources include the penny and mercantile newspapers of the period, which she deliberately read in their original, pre-microfilm state so as to become a "member of the reading public of Jewett's day." Ms. Cohen ransacked police court warrants, arrest dockets, probate records, divorce papers, land conveyance records, and tax assessments in the Fifth Ward. She rummaged through maps, censuses, city directories, deed books, and private letters and diaries. Even in the most voluminously researched popular history, I've never before seen an author thank a curator for supplying a pair of rubber gloves with which to conduct research.

Ms. Cohen probes her source material with the zeal of a Pinkerton. As she peels away layers of myth to reveal the realities of antebellum America's false standards of sexual morality, and the complex, demanding relationships that actually took place between prostitute and client, we feel the excitement of following an investigator whose gaze is fresh and sharp. Jewett's role as a victim of a sex crime, for example, takes on new meaning when we first understand that her life as a prostitute involved, as Ms. Cohen shows us, a reversal of sexual roles. Jewett–not her clients–held the power and controlled the liaison. "She, not they, set the terms of the relationship."

The result of Ms. Cohen's interpretive strategies is a sequence of set pieces that solve the puzzle of the crime and sustain our interest without a hint of the chronological tedium that more conventional biography can fall prey to. Imagine a gallery in which a genre painter exhibits richly painted scenes of lower middle-class life in 19th-century New York, the depth and hidden horror of which become more and more clear the longer we look. Ms. Cohen does for the veiled brothel world of lower Manhattan what William Hogarth did for London's Cheapside. Instead of giving us a world we want to live in vicariously or linger over affectionately, Ms. Cohen keeps us peering into the past as if into a chamber of horrors presented on the grand scale patented by that other notorious madam: Tussaud.

From the start, we understand that the unblinking figures and queerly lifelike scenes before us are intended to have a mirror effect. Without naming contemporary names, Ms. Cohen calls to mind the cases of our own notorious and arrogant twentysomethings, Monica Lewinsky and Stephen Glass, when she asks, "How could authentic evidence be distinguished from fabrication in the press? What was to prevent editors from simply making up material to entertain or to win a competitive edge over other papers?"

Within a week of covering the Jewett case, certain metropolitan newspapers saw their home-delivery subscriptions increase by thousands. The dailies that limited their coverage to straight news quickly discovered that their sales remained flat. The same historical looking glass shows us that, then as now, "supplying or recommending sexual entertainment enhanced male sociability and helped to cement business relationships between strangers." And even without the salesmanship of Herb Ritts to touch up her image, Ms. Cohen's Jewett possesses the assertiveness and gumption to serve today's reader as a spunky Monica prototype. "[Jewett] is an example of what the 'self-made man,' so famous to the Jacksonian era, looks like, when transmuted into the female body," argues Ms. Cohen. She adds, "Self-invention was her stock in trade, and imaginary romance what she sold for a living."

Jewett's relationships were anything but casual. Before an assignation could take place, she demanded from her clients highly evolved displays of courtship. Faithfulness, reciprocity and the exchange of intimate letters were required of both prostitute and client. Jewett's and Robinson's correspondence, which unfolded over the course of their stormy 10-month affair, demonstrates a degree of literary skill not usually associated with commercial sex. Ms. Cohen looks carefully into the subtext at each stage of sexual interaction, and while she presents Jewett and her clients as "playactors" in a drama, she also succeeds at seeing deeply into their inner lives.

Discussing the impact of John Vanderlyn's oil painting, The Death of Jane McCrea , on the prostitutes and clients who glimpsed it while flirting in the parlor at 41 Thomas Street, the author brilliantly analyzes the painting's violent imagery and the role McCrea's legend, a popular story of the Revolutionary War, may have played in the sexual fantasies and power struggles in the brothel. By the time Ms. Cohen has uncovered the deeper meaning of Jane McCrea's murder by hatchet–"women who claim independence and freedom of choice in lovers should expect the possibility of an untimely and bloody end"–and connected it to the fate of Helen Jewett and the other women working at 41 Thomas Street, the reader is well aware that we are in the presence of an often miraculous work of scholarship.

Ms. Cohen's visual aperçus are immensely satisfying because her writing is graphic and skillful and modest; rather than show off what she's unearthed, she leads us to participate in her discoveries. At the same time, Ms. Cohen too often sacrifices her narrative to the mass of interpretive detail. By the time Robinson's trial begins, more than two-thirds of the way into the book, too much of the story is still being discussed–told in the single key of ingenious scholarly sleuthing. Perhaps Ms. Cohen feared that the story had been told too many times by novelists. As recently as 1973, for example, Gore Vidal assigned Helen Jewett to Charlie Schuyler, the brothel-creeping narrator of Burr .

The Helen Jewett that Ms. Cohen reinvents for the 1990's is a figure we know well. Thirty years ago, she might have been glimpsed in the arms of a Nehru-jacketed movie star in Hugh Hefner's Los Angeles mansion. Ten years after that, she might have been a girl-next-door named Dorothy Stratton. We know her because she is still with us in the face of Kate Moss, and in the now ubiquitous "Presidential kneepads," which in only six months have gone from being a national embarrassment to an accepted fantasy.

In her own age, as now, Helen Jewett epitomized the ever-shifting and always political medium known to civilization as lust. Through her, Patricia Cline Cohen has written a significant contribution to the ever-expanding literature of Old New York.

One hundred and ninety-four years ago, long before schoolchildren found less elaborate ways to unleash aggression with guns, two rival New York politicians met each other at a discreetly hidden dueling ground in Weehawken, N.J. There, across the river from what is now 42nd Street, on a grassy ledge 20 feet above the Hudson, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton confronted each other at 10 paces with cocked .54-caliber pistols.

What followed on the field of honor that sunny Wednesday morning, July 11, 1804, was a tragedy that permanently altered the history of the early republic. Hamilton, 47, former Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington and creator of the national banking system, was fatally wounded and became an instant martyr. After hours of excruciating suffering, Hamilton died at 2 o'clock on July 12 and was given a funeral worthy of the "first citizen"–or saint–of New York. Burr, 48, Vice President of the United States, was indicted for premeditated murder in New Jersey and New York, and fled south, a fugitive from justice. Ever after ostracized as a coldblooded killer, Burr became a political outcast. As John Randolph of Virginia observed, Burr had "fallen like Lucifer, never to rise again."

In this well-researched but clumsily written study of the complex relationship between the opponents in the infamous duel, historian Arnold A. Rogow has re-examined evidence in both men's biographies to suggest that the motives that led Hamilton and Burr to such extreme hostility had been established years before their rivalry turned fatal in 1804. Both men had grown up as orphans. Hamilton, the illegitimate, unacknowledged son of a Jamaican planter and a mother accused of "whoring," envied the more privileged background of Burr, who, though he lost both his parents and grandparents at an early age, was the son of the second president of Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) and grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century theologian whose sermons sparked America's Great Awakening. Hamilton was denied admission to Princeton, where Burr graduated in 1772, but enrolled at Columbia (then Kings College).

During the American Revolution, both men distinguished themselves in characteristic manner: Hamilton as a duplicitous, fawning aide to Gen. George Washington, Burr as an independent-minded outsider and brave lieutenant colonel under Gen. Benedict Arnold. With the war won and the Constitution invented, the rivalry deepened when Hamilton and Burr became New York lawyers in 1783, often serving together as co-counsels in court, prosecuting civil and criminal cases. With women, both were courtly, gallant, dashing, with "persuasive voices." Both married for love and security: Hamilton into one of New York's richest, most influential families, the Schuylers; Burr to a widow 10 years older than himself.

Outwardly friendly to each other as they helped to turn the United States into a single, centrally governed nation, Hamilton and Burr remained rivals on a deeper level. Short, proud men, they were "mirror images of each other," Mr. Rogow suggests. For Hamilton, however, the reflection was distorted. In Burr he glimpsed his own darker impulses. Naturally vengeful, stimulated by self-hatred, Hamilton began to wage war on Burr in 1792. "I feel it to be a religious duty," he wrote that September, "to oppose his career."

For the next 12 years, Hamilton sabotaged his rival at every turn. He helped to engineer Burr's defeat in the mixed-up Presidential election of 1800–Burr and Jefferson received an equal number of electoral votes, throwing the election into the House of Representatives–and again in the New York gubernatorial race of 1804. Hamilton's letters again and again decry Burr for being "profligate," a "voluptuary in the extreme." Yet Hamilton was no angel himself. He suffered, as John Adams harrumphed, from a "superabundance of secretions" which "he could not find whores enough to draw off." But it was Hamilton's obsessive and implacable hatred of Burr that became his true vice and, as Mr. Rogow shows, his ultimate undoing.

The rivalry reached its inevitable climax when Hamilton spread word during the New York gubernatorial contest that Burr was "a dangerous man" who "ought not to be trusted." The final straw was added when Hamilton suggested that, even beyond politics, he held a "still more despicable opinion" of Burr, whereupon Burr demanded satisfaction and challenged Hamilton to the famous duel.

Historians have for decades debated what drove Burr to react so strongly to provocation. Burr, by nature sanguine, was not easily offended; and by 1804 he was a thick-skinned New York politician. An organizer of the Tammany Hall political machine and a former United States senator, Burr knew how to turn the other cheek when a rival such as Jefferson declared him a "crooked gun or other perverted machine."

From 1860 to the present, biographers and novelists alike have speculated about the role that women played in the conflict between Hamilton and Burr. Eliza Bowen Jumel, said to have been a prostitute in her youth and both men's lovers (Burr later married Jumel), has been suspected of coming between the antagonists, as has Hamilton's mistress of 1791, Maria Reynolds, whom Burr represented when she sued her husband for divorce in 1793. But it was Gore Vidal's brilliant, intuitive leap in Burr (1973) to recognize that it was the unusually close and often seductive relationship between Burr and his daughter Theodosia (deepened by the death of Theodosia's mother in 1794) that was the true source of the slander that resulted in Burr's challenge. Seen by Hamilton as incestuous, Burr's intimacy with Theodosia, however far it went in actuality, supplied both men with an understandable motive for wanting to destroy each other. "I couldn't think of anything of a 'despicable' nature that would drive [Burr] to so drastic an action," Mr. Vidal explained in private correspondence with Mr. Rogow in 1995.

From the novelist's brainstorm, the historian has now gone the next step, uncovering evidence that Hamilton did indeed believe that Burr could be his own daughter's lover. Decoding Hamilton's confidential correspondence with Gouverneur Morris in 1792–the same year Hamilton declared his holy war on Burr–Mr. Rogow reveals that Hamilton assigned code names to President Washington (Scavola, a first-century B.C. Roman tribune), five cabinet officers (Hamilton dubbed himself "Paulus," a brilliant general and much admired writer in the third century A.D.), and 19 Senators and Representatives, including Burr, to whom Hamilton gave the name of "Savius," a first-century A.D. Roman who was charged with seducing his son–an act, Mr. Rogow writes, said to have "scandalized even the most debauched Romans of his day."

While motive is now clearer, still without being definitive, details of the duel in Weehawken have long been uncertain. Did both men fire a shot? Who fired first? Eyewitness accounts disagreed on practically every important point. Burr's second, William P. Van Ness, afterward insisted that Hamilton fired first and fired to kill; after fussing with his spectacles because of the angle of the morning light, Hamilton leveled his pistol at Burr, in accordance with the rules of dueling, and fired a shot that was intended "to take, if possible, the life of his adversary."

Hamilton's second, Nathaniel Pendleton, was meanwhile confident that Hamilton had not fired first, but instead had kept to his "fixed resolution to do [Burr] no harm." Hamilton's letters to his wife on July 10 confirm that he wanted posterity to know that he had decided to risk his life at Weehawken but intended not to fire his weapon. Indeed, as Hamilton lay dying, and as the New York Evening Post , the newspaper Hamilton had founded, reported on July 16, Hamilton maintained that he had not fired at Burr, and that he planned to reserve and throw away his shot. A search of the dueling ground by Pendleton revealed that Hamilton had squeezed off a shot that went 4 feet wide of Burr, hitting a tree limb 12 1/2 feet off the ground.

Until 1976, no one had ever had a chance to look at the most important pieces of surviving evidence–the pistols themselves, a set of 9-inch, English-made dueling weapons provided by Hamilton and borrowed from his brother-in-law, John Barker Church. On the occasion of the U.S. Bicentennial, an arms expert was invited to supervise the creation of authentic reproductions of the pistols by David Rockefeller, chairman of the board of the Chase Manhattan Bank, in whose vaults the pistols had been stored since 1930. The arms expert, Merrill Lindsay, discovered that, unlike proper dueling pistols, both of the Church weapons had been weighted for greater accuracy and were designed less for dueling, as Mr. Rogow emphasizes, than for killing. Most surprising of all, both pistols had been equipped with a concealed hair-trigger that required a mere half-pound squeeze rather than the usual 10- to 12-pound pull. Hamilton, knowing the trick, could therefore have squeezed off a shot far more quickly than Burr. Hamilton, moreover, owned a pair of regular English dueling pistols but had decided to borrow the trick set from his brother-in-law.

Mr. Lindsay maintained that Hamilton "booby-trapped himself" at Weehawken. "As Hamilton lowered the gun on its target, he was holding a little too tightly and accidentally fired before he had Burr in his sights. Burr squeezed hard and slow and put an aimed shot into Hamilton." This also explains why, with death fast approaching, Hamilton would stick to his story, pre-established on the eve of the duel, that he never intended to fire at Burr. If a hidden hair-trigger were found in pistols that Hamilton had supplied for the duel, Burr might look less the villain and Hamilton more the fool.

On July 20, John Randolph of Virginia wrote to James Monroe. Hamilton's "violent death, at the hands of a man whom he persisted in discountenancing … which at first might be imputed to elevated principles, is, I fear, for the honor of human nature to be referred to personal pique against Mr. Burr." Or, as Jay Gatsby says to Nick Carraway in American literature's most all-purpose explanation for love that ends in violent tragedy, "It was just personal."

Hamilton, the more emotionally flawed of the two, could not help himself. His blind aim had been to destroy Burr, even if the cost to himself was absolute. "Had he valued his own life more and hated Burr less, there probably would have been no fatal duel," Mr. Rogow concludes, "but for the duel not to have happened would have required a history and a relationship between the two very different from the one described here." It would also have required a different society, and a different set of values about hostility and tolerance and the use of guns in American life. We can only marvel that more of our great political rivalries–Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy come most quickly to mind–did not end up on the grassy ledge in the heights of Weehawken.

Late in life, Burr got the last word. Referring to Lawrence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy , in which the narrator's Uncle Toby, tormented by a fly all through dinner, at last catches the fly, but instead of retaliating frees it, Burr remarked, "If I had read Sterne more, and Voltaire less, I should have known that the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me."

Lillian Ross, a great reporter and pathfinder of literary nonfiction, lived with Shawn and with him raised an adopted son. Their life together, written by Miss Ross as a love story, spanned more than 40 years of Shawn's married life and proceeded with the acknowledgment of Mrs. Shawn. Appearing alongside an informative but more predictable memoir of William Shawn's New Yorker by the writer Ved Mehta, Miss Ross' unexpected reporting from home buries once and for all the mild, prudish, eccentrically mannered "Mr. Shawn" of legend and ridicule, restoring to life a Bill Shawn who is far more complex, romantic, earthy, masculine and human.

Mr. Mehta's memoir will claim fresh space beside James Thurber's and Brendan Gill's yellowing best sellers, The Years with Ross and Here at "The New Yorker." However, it ultimately fails to go beyond its own boyish hero-worship. Even in death, Shawn remains in service to the needs of his writers. As Mr. Mehta's colleague Janet Flanner declared, "It's as if, Mehta, he were beyond our human conception."

But the reader has long since grown weary of that Mr. Shawn. Saintliness was only one aspect of the man. Six years after William Shawn's death from a heart attack on Dec. 8, 1992, Lillian Ross is finally taking the story in a new direction. Miss Ross' man is flesh and blood, a whole being. Hers is the first sighting of the Shawn who will claim attention in the future.

The reader of Mr. Mehta's memoir, meanwhile, may need reminding that William Shawn was a magazine editor. From the moment of his arrival at The New Yorker in 1959 to his departure 30 years later, the author attributed magical powers to the wonderful Mr. Shawn. Mr. Mehta's Shawn is mysterious, secretive, omnipotent, even "otherworldly." A mind reader, a master of concealment, he is to this memoir as Frank Morgan is to the 1939 M-G-M Wizard of Oz , appearing to our dependent, yellow-brick-road travelers in one guise of authority after another.

Under the jurisdiction of the "saintly and quiet" Shawn, the awestruck young writer is initiated into a "sacred editing process" in which he learns that "a writer and an editor had a higher calling than self-glorification-that they were partners in a search for truth." The great and powerful Shawn finds the magazine's "latest inductee" an apartment to live in, meanwhile supplying an office at the magazine and a drawing account from which to pay his rent. In addition, a charge account is established for him at an East Side grocer's. Meanwhile, as the paternal Mr. Shawn treats young Mr. Mehta's every word with deep respect, submitting his writing to "no fewer than 16 readings," it suddenly becomes clear that Mr. Mehta is telling a conversion story.

Ordained in Shawn's New Yorker , Mr. Mehta has traded not just the worlds of India and Oxford for America, but the world of blindness for the world of sight. As a nonsighted person in India, he explains, he was treated as if he were handicapped. At Shawn's magazine, he is allowed to be free of those strictures. Not only does Shawn consult with Mr. Mehta about the work of visual artists whom Mr. Mehta cannot see except through the eyes of another, but, with Shawn's approval, Mr. Mehta begins a lifelong habit of writing as if he were sighted. On these terms, it is no wonder that the living Shawn was so often understood in a biblical sense.

Miss Ross, by contrast, shows us that as the editor in chief of one of the most influential and insular institutions in American literature and journalism, Shawn was both more alive to his work and more depressed by it than we have been led to believe.

In 1952, when Raoul Fleischmann, owner of The New Yorker , chose Shawn to succeed Harold Ross as editor, Ross (no relation to Lillian) begged Shawn not to accept the offer, warning that the job would literally kill him. But Shawn, who had been managing editor since 1939, felt he had no choice. He cared deeply about The New Yorker and about its writers and artists, and he believed that he could not abandon them at that crucial turning point in the magazine's life. Characteristically, he gave no thought to his own life's needs; he did "what was best for the magazine." For the next 35 years, seven days a week, sometimes grinding all day and night, Shawn gave himself to the unending job of bringing the work of others, in his words, to a "state of something like perfection."

In truth, he had found a hiding place. "He did this work so easily, so smoothly, so quietly, so anonymously, that he could make it seem he wasn't doing anything at all," writes Miss Ross. "He could make it seem he wasn't there. He did not have to exist. He did not have to think about existing. Giving his help was a reflex action. It was life-giving-in one way-to lose himself in other creative people."

In another way, Miss Ross reveals, it was a trap. The very qualities that made Shawn a great editor were also symptoms of a lifelong problem. He could not do for himself what he could easily do for others. As a hard-working schoolboy in Chicago, he had helped his classmates with their homework. In high school, he managed the baseball team and, as president of the class of 1925, received high praise for his "extraordinary executive and administrative knowledge." Most telling of all, at age 14 Bill Shawn started and finished a novel for an older friend. Then, when he began writing another novel, this time for himself alone, he abandoned it, telling his mother, "It is not what I wish to write"-the very words he would use some 70 years later, when, after being fired from The New Yorker , he again attempted to write for himself alone.

The adult Shawn came to think of the job of editor as a form of "nonexistence." It was, he once told Miss Ross, "the ultimate cell." Imprisoned by his duties on the 19th floor at 25 West 43rd Street, he sometimes felt total despair. He grieved for a "secret self"-the writer he might have been and still sometimes hoped to be. In his marriage, meanwhile, he was even more suffocated and full of grief.

By 1952, Shawn had been married for 24 years to a woman he had met on a blind date at age 17. Cecille Lyon, a features writer at the Chicago Daily News , had given up work to devote herself to Bill and their family. She had five children in six years but only three survived: two sons, Wallace and Allen, and a daughter, Mary, who had been born brain-damaged and was sent away to a special school. The Shawns lived in an apartment at 1150 Fifth Avenue and spent summers in rented houses in Bronxville. The marriage was a shell. As Shawn later described his life at home to Miss Ross, "I am there but I am not there." He cared about Cecille and loved his children and went off every morning to edit The New Yorker , but inside he had to remind himself that he was alive.

In a voice that one associates more with Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett than with the blithe-spirited magazine that Shawn had inherited in 1952, he questioned his existence as frankly and desperately as he questioned himself: "Why am I more ghost than man?"; "Who has declared me null and void?" His own death, which he had feared all his life, "was always with him," Miss Ross writes. Each morning Shawn would marvel, "I'm still here."

This voice, which we have never heard before, helps explain, in part, how his New Yorker became the dominant moral and spiritual conscience of the cold war. A man attuned daily to his own existential doomsday would logically introduce to national consciousness the dangers of nuclear testing, American policy in Vietnam, pesticides in the ecosystem, aerosol propellants in the atmosphere, nuclear statecraft and proliferation, homelessness-subjects that often became widely recognized as crises only after appearing in Shawn's pages. His peculiar paradox was that as editor of The New Yorker , he could change the world but not himself. With no idea how to free himself from his inner turmoil, no notion of whom or even how to ask for help, he remained stuck and helpless.

Enter Miss Ross. They had been working together at The New Yorker since 1945. From the beginning there was a powerful sense of likeness between them. They were two narcissists, and instead of repelling each other, they felt profoundly whole together. Miss Ross, however, had no inkling of Shawn's agony at first. Soon, too, Shawn's torment was aggravated by the fact that he had fallen in love with her. On the day Miss Ross' soon-to-be-famous profile of Ernest Hemingway appeared in the magazine, he took her to lunch at the Algonquin; calling her "darling," he managed to hint at his feelings. Love poems and messages followed, appearing on Miss Ross' desk. Then came his first awkward declaration of love. He meanwhile made clear that he could never leave his wife and children but at the same time left them every night to stand under Miss Ross' fifth-floor apartment window. Eventually, by way of distance and indecision, the relationship deepened, and one day, needing no words between them, Shawn and Miss Ross exchanged a look, left the offices of The New Yorker , took a taxi to the Plaza, got a room and went to bed.

Miss Ross' dual gift, Shawn once pointed out, is for observation and invisibility. Her steely, stainless portraits of Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin, Adlai Stevenson and Harry Winston achieved a high degree of clarity in part because of her absence from the scene. Her characterization of Bill Shawn is no less daring or sharp for her involvement in the story. As a romantic (his favorite words were "magical" and "enchanting") and as a suitor, he lives in these pages as he has nowhere before. As Miss Ross helped him let go of deeply ingrained fears and phobias, Shawn "revealed, without apology, that he yearned for a taste, just a taste, of some of the luxury items that were so often advertised in his magazine": Porthault, Pratesi, Baccarat, Scalamandré. Their adventures buying yellow bathing trunks for Shawn and then making their getaway to a Catskills resort have the wacky romantic appeal of oddball French films of the early 1970's. Their lovemaking, writes Miss Ross, was passionate, tender and inventive, their zest for each other endless. The supposedly mild Shawn had a strong sexual urge; so strong that in their first weeks together, recalls Miss Ross, she found his energy "alarming." Shawn loved women (Miss Ross' catalogue of her man's tastes is among the most memorable set pieces in her work), and though Miss Ross does not say so explicitly, it is clear that the freedom she helped Shawn to find allowed him in turn to be freer, easier, more himself with all women.

In time, the affair turned them into a couple. As a couple, they managed to live a life that, according to Miss Ross, felt "intrinsically normal" yet not "ordinary" at all. They spent every Christmas Eve together, while Shawn gave Thanksgiving and Christmas Day to Cecille and their children. Every day they met for breakfast, went to work together at The New Yorker , met again for lunch and again for supper, after which Shawn would drop Miss Ross at her apartment and go back to his family, a half-mile up Fifth Avenue. He would return to watch television: the 11 o'clock news and, at 11:30, The Saint -the series about that other master of concealment. From there, Miss Ross' account turns opaque; presumably, at some point in the night, Shawn would return to his own apartment.

Lillian Ross has demonstrated in her classic pieces of reporting that selection of fact and arrangement of dialogue and observable incident can by themselves accrue meaning. Appearing to be a cheerful, disinterested bystander, Miss Ross is, in fact, a highly judgmental reporter, formidable in her approval and disapproval; for students of journalism, her work and the principles that guided her act as a medium of instruction.

Here but Not Here depends heavily on selectivity. Miss Ross' love of her own work is stressed to the point of sternness, as are the unchanging joys of the love she and Shawn found in each other, as is their sex life, which, according to Miss Ross, "never deteriorated." Meanwhile, shopworn words like "fidelity" and "unfaithful" and "adultery" and "mistress" are omitted. Instead, Miss Ross is clear and straightforward as she describes the feelings created by the complicated arrangements governing the private lives of what in the end amounted to 11 people. She cuts straight to the bone, remembering sadness and pain and pity and rage and guilt and disappointment, and she takes honest inventory of her own anger and "explosions" when, in the early days of their liaison, Shawn would leave her to "check in a few blocks north." Ultimately, though, Shawn made theirs the love story-Cecille, writes Miss Ross, "was in truth outside of us"-and although it's strange that Mrs. Shawn never divorced her husband but instead went along with the arrangements necessary for his life with Miss Ross, it's not surprising.

Shawn never integrated himself. In "doing what was best for the magazine," he expressed a father's sense of responsibility to a family. But fathers, we have discovered a generation later, will be truly responsible to others if they are also responsible to themselves. Revived and kept alive by allowing himself to love Miss Ross, he simultaneously remained in a marriage in which he could not be real, either to himself or his family. Shawn never told his children about his new love or his new adopted son. He never truthfully explained his absences. Rejoined with Miss Ross after a night apart, Shawn sometimes admitted that he felt suicidal.

For all its remembered joy, this is a sad, sometimes tragic book. Miss Ross' description of her last supper with Shawn is haunting. His eyes, always pure sky-blue, had that night turned black. The next morning, on the private telephone line previously used only by herself and Shawn, Miss Ross learns the news from Mrs. Shawn. With her son, Erik, she races to the Shawns' apartment to find the door held only partway open by Shawn's grown-up son Wallace, who, in shock, turns away to ask his mother's permission to let in Lillian and Erik Ross. Death has suddenly reversed Shawn's families: Those on the inside are now outside.

The scene is harrowing, and not only because everyone involved tries to meet each other with dignity in Shawn's death, but because, for his survivors, the hurt in that moment seems to come as much from the life in which they've all been made complicit as from the death they must now face alone.

It is this scene, more than any other, that puts distance between Miss Ross and Mr. Mehta. When the Shawn family adopted the young Ved Mehta for Thanksgivings and other family gatherings-"I imagined that I was taken into the family fold as a fifth member"-the writer focused his already romantic feelings about the " New Yorker family" on the inner circle of Shawns, but with no further penetration or insight. It is enough for Mr. Mehta to record his pleasure, and pain, at being taken in as a young man by what seemed to him an ideal family. "I never stopped comparing myself and my family unfavorably with the Shawns," he admits, and the pathos intensifies for the reader of Lillian Ross' memoir, who now knows all too well the other, more grown-up version of the sadly dysfunctional Shawns.

While Miss Ross rather overconscientiously speaks only for herself, Mr. Mehta risks speaking for a large and disparate group of staff writers, with varying results. In rare events such as the blackout of 1965, the plural voice succeeds at re-creating the powerful feeling of family and community and collective conscience that Shawn's New Yorker engendered in its members and readers. At other times, such as when the staff split over important issues, most crucially the firing of Shawn in 1987 and his replacement by Robert Gottlieb, the first-person plural seems the least trustworthy voice for the story.

Although Mr. Mehta's text is documented with much new information about Shawn's final days, it is also tainted by bitterness. Mr. Mehta portrays the magazine's new owner, S.I. Newhouse Jr., as a brutish stepfather usurping the place of the perfect father. A snob and a sorehead, he submits Mr. Gottlieb's first Comment to the kind of nit-picking it would have received under Shawn's pencil. Covering the same period, Miss Ross restrains herself mightily, keeping her eye on the man and off the office politics, in which she herself played a dramatic role. From that point of view, the role Shawn played in his own demise becomes clearer.

Earlier, Miss Ross recalls questioning Shawn's "compulsion to be utterly forgiving and kind to people who were rude or cruel or opportunistic or destructive or insulting to him." As both she and Shawn were Jewish, she would wonder to herself, "Why is this man trying to be more Christian than a Christian?" In the early 1980's, with storm clouds forming over the business office at the magazine, Shawn failed to support a protective purchase offer from financier Warren Buffett in the name of fairness to New Yorker owner Peter Fleischmann-who later turned around and betrayed Shawn. Shawn's loyalty to Fleischmann and his ultimate regret at having turned away Mr. Buffett can be read against him. More than once as the magazine changed hands, Shawn's fair-mindedness extravagantly shortchanged not only himself, but the very writers and artists he had always fought to protect.

Lovingly re-created by Mr. Mehta, Shawn's New Yorker exists as a ship in a bottle-it seems impossible that as recently as a decade ago there was still room in the culture for a remarkably prosperous general-interest magazine that was written and edited for the reader without the influence of the publisher, the advertiser, the pollster and the publicist, much less the voting membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Mr. Mehta makes astute points about the paternalism of Shawn's New Yorker and the "crippling dependence" created in a certain kind of writer by an editor as selfless and idiosyncratic as Shawn. The "elusive," external "Mr. Shawn" of Mr. Mehta's page 414 is the same mysterious, selfless saint we met on page 9.

He is not the same man as Miss Ross' gifted, flawed, pained, inspired Bill Shawn, a failure in his own eyes, guilty to the point of contemplating suicide but vowing still to fight his despair. This is the leader who proves, as Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War, that greatness lies in falling short of perfection. On his final day at The New Yorker , having lost the battle but won the war, Bill Shawn wrote a farewell letter to his staff. He chose 160 words to say goodbye; six times he used the word love. "Love," he said, "has been the controlling emotion, and love is the essential word."