Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer
By Fred Kaplan
Harper, 416 pages, $27.95

Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander In Chief
By James M. McPherson
Penguin, 384 pages, $35

Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon
By Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr.
Alfred A. Knopf, 512 pages, $50

The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and
Legacy from 1860 to Now
Edited by Harold Holzer
Library of America, 964 pages, $40

Lincoln looms large this Thanksgiving. He always resurfaces in November, the month of the Gettysburg Address and the holiday he helped to create (it was in 1863 that he invited his fellow citizens “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens”). He also tends to reappear when we’re in trouble: in the 1960s, and the 1930s, when F.D.R. visited his memorial every year on his birthday, and tried overtly to claim Lincoln for the Democratic party. Such a realignment seems to be in the cards again, judging from Barack Obama’s recent words and deeds. It will drive the Republicans crazy, but that’s half the fun of it. In fact, they left Lincoln a long time before he left them.

Why do we love Lincoln? One simple answer is the tidal pull of marketing—a force Lincoln, the most photographed politician of his era, understood well. Next Feb.12 marks the bicentennial of his birth in that famous log cabin, and entire forests are being wiped out to keep up with what is expected to be a healthy demand for the latest in Lincoln biography. (Dwight Macdonald divided all American writing into three categories: fiction, nonfiction and Civil War.)

It’s been said that no book with Lincoln on the cover has ever lost money, and publishers will subject that hypothesis to a robust test in 2009, with books ranging from exhibit companions (the Library of Congress is planning a retrospective) to compilations of his writings to essays about him to scholarly treatises. At present, a search for “Lincoln” on Amazon yields nearly a quarter million results (241,858 and counting)—almost half the number of soldiers who fell in the Civil War. That would suggest that for all our searching, we still haven’t found him.

The new flood of books will allow us to reacquaint ourselves with a president so familiar that we sometimes forget how elusive he can be. Fifty years ago, in an address to Congress, Carl Sandburg put it well when he called him “as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog.” In one of his eerie final dreams, Lincoln felt himself to be “in a singular and indescribable vessel moving with great rapidity toward a dark and indescribable shore.” So he continues to float, a little out of control, like an untethered balloon at the Macy’s parade, leading us once again to parts unknown.

BUT THERE'S MORE to it than a birthday—one also feels something new, what Seamus Heaney once called the “rhyme” between hope and history. We’re about to inaugurate a 44th president with more than a passing resemblance to the 16th. Barack Obama’s supporters have compared him at various moments to John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, with varying degrees of plausibility, but the media has generally ignored the historical comparison that the candidate himself has always promoted. Mr. Obama launched his campaign on February 10, 2007 (an eternity ago), in Springfield, Ill., and cited exactly one historic figure—Lincoln. All Illinois politicians talk about Lincoln—it comes with the license plate—but Mr. Obama does so with feeling. He announced his VP pick in Springfield. His victory speech quoted Lincoln’s first inaugural (“We are not enemies, but friends”). His farewell letter to the people of Illinois two weeks ago cited Lincoln’s farewell to Springfield. The theme of his inaugural will be “A New Birth of Freedom,” a phrase from the Gettysburg Address that he used at the very beginning, in his speech launching his candidacy.

It’s the perfect theme, both patriotic and corrective, implying that we’re in need of a new definition of “freedom,” perhaps the most important word in the American language, and yet one that we have grown a little tired of hearing about, in the wake of Guantánamo and other shortcomings. Lincoln argued against exactly this problem, furious that defenders of slavery tried to claim “freedom” as a reason to invade sovereign nations, and eager to give it a new meaning, closer to what the founders intended—a word meant to connote human rights, tolerance and the unfettered potential of the individual, not secrecy, war and the untrammeled power of the executive. He put it well in 1864: “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.” It will be a great pleasure to see the word brought back to its proper coordinates.

Of course, freedom is also a word with special relevance to the African-American story. For all his imperfections, Lincoln remains essential to that story. On Easter Sunday 1939, after being barred from Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, Marian Anderson sang from the comforting shade of the Lincoln Memorial. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr., gave the culminating address of the Civil Rights movement in front of Lincoln’s statue. On election night 2008, an alert photographer, Matt Mendelsohn, went to the memorial and captured the spontaneous eruptions of joy there (he described them in a New York Times Op-Ed the next day). The inaugural, three weeks before the bicentennial, will only deepen the connection: Thanks to the fact that presidents now speak on the west side of the Capitol, Barack Obama will be in direct dialogue with Abraham Lincoln, as they face each other across the Mall and all of American history.

AMAZINGLY, SOME OF THIS season’s books actually bring news. It’s hard to believe that any fresh discoveries are possible, but as historians plow these well-tilled fields, they continue to unearth new facts and artifacts. It was only this year that a curator found new images of the second inaugural at the Library of Congress. And it was not too long ago—1976—that the contents of his pocket the night he was killed were made available for the first time: two pairs of eyeglasses (one repaired with twine), a penknife, a watch fob, a cuff link, a handkerchief and a wallet with a Confederate $5 bill. The two eyeglasses had different prescriptions—perfect for a president coming in and out of focus all the time.

In the last few years, we’ve had Depressed Lincoln (compelling); Gay Lincoln (unpersuasive); and Machiavellian Lincoln (the master manipulator of his Team of Rivals). Among the new Lincolns now being offered up are Lincoln the Commander (a gripping study of Lincoln’s military leadership by James McPherson, the Civil War historian); Lincoln the Writer (an elegant portrait of his literary sensibility from Fred Kaplan); and Lincoln the God (a fascinating coffee-table book that describes how Americans became obsessed by Lincoln from his death in 1865 to the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922). That last book comes from the Kunhardt family, who not only recount this story, but inhabit it, for it was their ancestor, Frederick Meserve, who began the large collection of Lincoln photographs they continue to create books from.

Even the Library of America is joining the frenzy. It has already published three books of Lincoln’s writings, but now adds a fourth, essays about Lincoln, among them some works that were long hard to find. A number of foreign perspectives are included: Tolstoy was a strong Lincoln man; and with this volume, Karl Marx at last makes a cameo appearance in the Library of America, a fact that will brighten the day of conspiracy theorists everywhere.

Perhaps the most topical new book is Harold Holzer’s study of “the Great Secession Winter” that elapsed from Lincoln’s election to his assumption of power. It’s a moving portrait of a politician still feeling his way forward on the national stage, but beginning to find his strength. Mr. Holzer uncovers arresting kernels of information (the night Lincoln passed through Albany on his way to Washington, John Wilkes Booth, acting in the same city, stabbed himself badly when he fell on his dagger onstage). Nearly every detail evokes the present as well as the past, describing an outsider preparing to save the republic from years of misrule. Lincoln is besieged by visitors both friendly and unfriendly; he negotiates delicately with cabinet appointees; he gives more than 100 speeches, some better than others. Finally, he travels to inherit the prize, passing through a New York City that is not entirely responsive (its mayor threatened to secede, and P. T. Barnum put on display “The Great Lincoln Turkey”) before moving on to Philadelphia, Baltimore (where he was nearly killed) and finally Washington itself, where he was derided for avoiding assassination. It’s sobering to see the obstacles this outsider had to overcome to become Lincoln. Not only did most of the South secede before he took office, he also had the worst secret service nickname in history (“Nuts”).

Reading through this logjam of books, I was reminded of an observation made by Lincoln’s personal aide, John Nicolay. “Lincoln’s features were the despair of every artist who undertook his portrait. … Graphic art was powerless before a face that moved through a thousand delicate gradations of line and contour, light and shade, sparkle of the eye and curve of the lip, in the long gamut of expression from grave to gay. … There are many pictures of Lincoln; there is no portrait of him.” But that elusiveness does not discourage—on the contrary, it makes the hunt all the more exciting. “We cannot escape history,” Lincoln told us, and this holiday season the sheer number of references to him seems to prove it. But as he also reminded us, we have it eternally in our power to think anew. At this terribly important juncture in the saga of the United States, with Lincoln near the helm, we begin to do just that.

Ted Widmer, who directs the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, was a speechwriter for President Clinton. His latest book is Ark of the Liberties: America and the World (Hill and Wang). He can be reached at books@observer.com.

For a people whom Tocqueville described as living eternally in the future, we Americans do quite a lot of remembering. Eight weeks ago, it was Martin Luther King Jr., who has been gone longer than he was alive. Now we enter the season of remembrance for a former New York senator, Robert F. Kennedy, a season made all the more poignant by the depressing news that the Liberal Lion, Ted Kennedy, is suddenly and unexpectedly a lion in winter.

R.F.K.’s busy life ended on June 6, 1968; barely, it seemed, after eulogizing King with one of the most arresting (and spontaneous) speeches in American history. It feels safe to say that no one else in American public life would have quoted Aeschylus’ Agamemnon to an angry black crowd on the day that King was killed. It also seems, with the insight that time has brought, that Kennedy was trebly reflective that night in Indianapolis, thinking about his assassinated brother, about M.L.K. and perhaps even about his own demise, which many of his friends felt to be imminent. The verses he chose that evening still help as we try to make sense of the void left by this most unusual politician:

“Against our will” may be the key phrase, aptly summing up the awkwardness and ultimate valor of Robert Kennedy’s run for the presidency in 1968. The gambit faced enormous obstacles from the start, including R.F.K.’s early ambivalence and the challenge of running against several challengers, in different locales, with little advance warning. It lasted a mere 82 days—hardly any time at all measured by the Homeric contest joining Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—but it brought out such good qualities in the candidate and the country that it simply refuses to expire. As long as Americans feel unrepresented by their representatives—in other words, forever—the Kennedy campaign of 1968 will endure as example of how, in the candidate’s own words, we can do better.

A GOOD NEW book—along with a splashy cover story in Vanity Fair—brings it all back home. One could fairly question the assumption that a new book is needed, for we have no shortage of commentary about the campaign. Even before he ran, there were books predicting that he would; then there was the race itself and all the press coverage; and then a flood of retrospective books after it came to an abrupt end in a kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Many are excellent, including touching memoirs by reporters who covered the campaign (David Halberstam, Jules Witcover), and broader canvases painted by friends and aides closer to the man himself (Arthur Schlesinger Jr., William vanden Heuvel, Jean Stein and George Plimpton). A spate of recent biographies has added to the pile, and yet the need to understand persists, not only because of the candidate’s magnetism but because so many of the questions about America he dared to ask that spring remain unanswered.

Thurston Clarke has written about the Kennedys before (a good study of J.F.K.’s Inaugural Address), and brings familiarity and efficiency to the task. Unlike many R.F.K. books, The Last Campaign has comparatively little on his early life and his long service at the side of his older brother. That’s a shame, because the start of his career was so arrestingly different from his candidacy, but the advantage is that we move very quickly into the race itself, with its roller-coaster swerves and lurches. Mr. Clarke advances at a sprightly pace, has a keen eye for detail and captures not only the externals but the fascinating inner dynamics of the contest.

Paradoxes were not hard to find in 1968, beginning with a photogenic candidate who could be terribly shy, a man of courage who waited too long to enter the race, and a critic of violence who plunged into crowds again and again, seemingly courting disaster.

As Mr. Clarke reminds us, it was anything but a coronation. When he returned to Washington from his first campaign trip, he found no one at the airport to greet him, and joked “even my driver has deserted me.” Sometimes he had to remind his audiences to clap, and at the beginning, he struggled against verbal miscues (he asked the people of Kansas to work for him in their “villages and hamlets”) and serious shortages (his aides were forced to hand out leftover buttons from his Senate races).

Those were the good problems. The more serious ones included the vitriolic hatred he aroused, both within and without the Democratic party he was trying to lead. Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover did all they could to undermine him; establishment politicians and newspaper owners taunted him for his youth and his long hair (a headline in the Indianapolis Star: “Unfit, Unshorn, Unwanted”). Hate mail poured in from both the right (outraged by his criticism of the Vietnam War) and the left (furious that he was not moving faster). A major drama of the book lies in the growing dread—fanned by quotations from friends, rivals and the candidate himself—that a nameless assassin was lurking in the throngs. “I’m afraid there are guns between me and the White House,” he told an aide. Yet his indifference to danger, and his electric connection with the huge numbers of people who came out to see and touch him, was essential to his appeal.

Given these challenges, it’s understandable that he began to move in unconventional directions, ignoring the normal rules of politics to devise new sorts of events, a sort of “jazz politics” with improvised remarks, self-mocking jokes, long sessions with crowds, and extensive Q&A sessions everywhere he went. Ever the contrarian, he would articulate angry black concerns to angry white audiences, and vice versa. Amazingly, he appealed to both, drawing in George Wallace supporters as well as Black Panthers. He would go hundreds of miles away from where the votes were to court Native Americans on reservations; children and elderly in ghettos; and remote rural Americans who’ve barely seen a presidential candidate since. He flouted an essential rule in American politics (never quote a French philosopher under any circumstances), citing Camus and Sartre with reckless abandon, and then immersing himself again in the crowd. Has there ever been a greater existentialist?

Mr. Clarke captures this transformation with skill, showing R.F.K. emerging, page by page, into a brilliant and utterly iconoclastic politician over those short months on the trail. Though his anguish over Dallas never left him—and may have explained his desire to taunt danger—Mr. Clarke argues, persuasively, that R.F.K. was a completely different kind of Kennedy, willing to say things and go places that his more carefully scripted brother never would have.

Conservative Indiana turned out to be the crucible for these growing talents. Kennedy campaigned well and won 10 of its 11 districts. From that character test, he grew stronger, and despite a setback in Oregon, he seemed poised to win the nomination with a victory in the California primary. That he was killed at this supreme moment of vindication, for so little reason, still comes as a plot twist so outrageously unacceptable that Shakespeare wouldn’t have dared inflict it on his public.

Hauntingly, he had predicted, just before his victory, that “Los Angeles is my Resurrection City.”

The religious wording almost fits—for as he wandered deeply into the invisible parts of America that lay below the poverty line, he began to seem like someone out of a medieval pilgrim’s tale, part Christian mendicant, part Greek philosopher. Just as J.F.K. had loved Camelot, so R.F.K. loved Man of La Mancha, and throughout this book there’s a sense of the quixotic journey, and the beautiful world that might have come into existence if the pilgrimage had reached a better terminus. One witness cites the “phantom presidency” that all of R.F.K.’s staff identified with, like the memory of an amputated limb, long after his assassination.

R.F.K. WOULD SURELY have resisted the tendency to idealize him. As Aeschylus wrote, “know not to revere human things too much.” It remains unclear—despite several tantalizing crumbs that Mr. Clarke leaves in the reader’s path—that he would have won the nomination at Chicago without the support of the ultra-superdelegate, Mayor Richard Daley. Even if he’d won, it’s naïve to assume that any presidency would have been successful at the end of the 1960s, though it’s hard to imagine one that would have turned out worse than Richard Nixon’s.

The unfinished feeling behind this story of a work eternally in progress is what leaves so many readers and voters wanting to know more about Robert Kennedy. It was a feeling that profoundly animated the Clinton White House, especially near the end, as new initiatives were designed to support the same people Kennedy had reached out to. It still animates the supporters of both Democratic candidates (a rare point of convergence), for R.F.K. can be plausibly argued to be in the camp of either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, depending on whether one is talking about his appeal to black voters, rural voters, Appalachians—or the simple fact that he was a New York Senator running against two other Senators. Her remark was unfortunate, but a candidate with a famous last name, accused of ruthlessness, running against most of the party and the media establishment, with the support of blue collar voters and other outliers—that’s vintage R.F.K.

Of course, 2008 is not 1968 (thank God). But still, that revolutionary moment lives on in powerful ways, often when we least expect it. The same day that the news hit about Ted Kennedy, a small story ran in the Bloomberg News that the town of Greenwich, Conn., had been presented with an application to build a personal residence with a 12-car garage and 26 toilets. Sometimes it’s not so difficult to understand why Americans remain fascinated with Robert Kennedy.

Ted Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, was a speechwriter for President Clinton from 1997 to 2001. His new book, Ark of the Liberties: America and the World (Hill and Wang), will be published in July. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

During the heady days of the Kennedy administration, there was a brief White House vogue for the journals of the Duc de Saint-Simon, the 18th-century courtier whose gemlike observations captured small, highly entertaining moments at Versailles that otherwise would have been lost to history. Now it’s clear that an American Saint-Simon was right there—and for a long time after—recording everything for posterity, ever alert to the combination of tragedy and farce that made Saint-Simon so mesmerizing. This mountain of writing was created by a diminutive man, the historian and presidential aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and now stands as something more than his legacy. With its acerbic asides, its deep character studies and its barometer of political weather across half a century, it will guide historians for generations to come.

The publication of Schlesinger’s Journals brings to completion his life of nonstop commentary, beginning with an obscure book he published in 1939 about the New England reformer Orestes Brownson. Sixty-eight years later, we have the other bookend, and quite an end it is. For much of that time—from 1952 to 2000—he was adding to this growing mass of recollection, and just before he died, he revealed the treasure’s existence—a pile of manuscript notebooks, just above a small icebox in his office. Two of his sons, Stephen and Andrew Schlesinger, were asked to edit them into something publishable. They performed their charge with skill and dispatch, reducing 6,000 pages to 1,000 within three months. In effect, the new offering is volume two of the memoir their father published in 2000, A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950. But these entries are closer to the moment, and more naked.

Schlesinger famously made popular a theory that American history is lived in cycles; but as this book reveals, so is life itself. The drama of these journals comes not from the rich and famous names meticulously recorded, but from the real sense he conveys of a life of passionate engagement, with all of its ups and downs. The medieval Wheel of Fortune (Rota Fortunae) never ceases to spin for him, from exultation to catastrophe and back again.

The book begins slowly, with an entry on March 29, 1952, describing a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, an event that seems to come from a time nearly as antediluvian as Jefferson and Jackson themselves. From the beginning, Schlesinger is both participant and observer, writing speeches for Adlai Stevenson one minute, and interviewing President Truman the next. Even before he turned 35, he had found the crow’s nest that would allow him to scan the political horizon to the end of his journey.

The pace quickens with the introduction of his hero, John F. Kennedy, contemplating a run for the presidency, and eager for Schlesinger to rally to his standard. Wary at first, Schlesinger succumbs utterly to J.F.K.’s charm, and helpfully allows the reader to experience it along with him. Through his eyes, Kennedy is anything but a callow young man; rather, he seems to have evolved to a higher state of political understanding than anything we have seen since—bemused by the absurdities of his profession but tightly disciplined, self-deprecating but deeply charismatic, able to recognize dangerous tendencies all around him and yet stay above the fray, Kennedy was clearly a political prodigy of the highest order.

It comes as no surprise that J.F.K. would emerge from this book with an aura, but it’s refreshing to have his humanity restored as well. He is eminently real in these pages, endowed with serious liabilities along with unique gifts. In their first conversation, Kennedy discusses his physical frailty; at one point Schlesinger catches him putting on a back brace. But there’s no self-pity—quite the opposite.

These years are tautly described, from the electricity of the 1960 campaign to the knife’s edge of the Cuban missile crisis. Schlesinger conveys an almost physical sense of politics as a contact sport, from the dramatic events that unfolded with dizzying rapidity (Bay of Pigs, Berlin, nuclear test ban, civil rights) to the celebrity-packed parties that offered a tinkling intermezzo in the background. Schlesinger’s second worst day in the White House comes when he falls into a swimming pool at a wild soiree thrown by Ethel Kennedy—the worst, of course, is Nov. 22, 1963, which he renders with the visceral force one would expect.

In a way, it’s all downhill from there. No one has ever caught as well the awkwardness of the transition to L.B.J.’s administration, with its tinhorn pieties and exaggerated machismo. Schlesinger put up with it as long as he could, which was not very long. Soon, however, there was a new crusade, as Robert Kennedy became senator from New York, then a critic of L.B.J.’s Vietnam policy, and ultimately a presidential candidate in his own right. Schlesinger revives all of the awkwardness and glory of R.F.K.’s last campaign, with its half-starts and rapid acceleration near the end, like an airplane struggling to take off from an airstrip behind enemy lines. The entry for June 9, 1968 conveys such anguish that the publishers put it on the back cover. J.F.K. may have represented the family’s high-water mark, but R.F.K. won Schlesinger’s heart more deeply than anyone else he ever worked for.

HIS JOURNALS OFFER HUNDREDS of cameos of the great and near-great, many delightful. Harry Truman meets Pablo Picasso, and berates him for failing to capture what a goat truly looks like. (He would know.) Dwight Eisenhower confesses his secret theory that Laos is “a nation of homosexuals.” Ronald Reagan watches pornography in his hotel room while waiting to be renominated in 1984.

Best of all are Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who reappear throughout Schlesinger’s life as a kind of reverse Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, spreading malice and disinformation wherever they go. One almost becomes fond of them. Over and over again, Schlesinger asserts that Nixon’s career is finished—but then, of course, the Wheel decrees that he will never go away! This opéra bouffe continues until the hilarious 1979 scene when Schlesinger learns, to his disbelief, that Nixon is moving into the house that abuts his on the Upper East Side. With relish, he records all of the catty details we would want to know about being Nixon’s neighbor—the suspicion that the Nixons turned out the lights on Halloween, and the observed fact that the 37th president liked to lie out in the sun in his backyard—wearing a suit and tie.

The Kissinger story is more complicated: He and Schlesinger were old pals dating back to Harvard. Invariably, whenever he sees Arthur, Mr. Kissinger offers dovish thoughts (his reputation may suffer in Republican circles), bad-mouths the presidents he works for and dishes generously. One of the more insane, Dr. Evil-ish theories peddled by Mr. Kissinger is this reflection on Nixon: “[E]verything was weird in that slightly homosexual, embattled atmosphere of the White House.”

AS WITH ALL JOURNALS, there’s a fair amount of jumping around from topic to topic, and an occasional surfeit of information. We probably don’t need to know that Doris Kearns Goodwin bought $20 tickets to a Star Trek convention for their families on Feb. 16, 1976. After a while, the perpetual round of dinners at Elaine’s and Mortimer’s can be numbing. Predictably, the man, and therefore the book, lose some energy toward the end, and there’s a certain entropy as the party of F.D.R. and J.F.K. gives way to Carter, Mondale and Dukakis.

If there’s news in this book, it may be the revelation of quiet but intense dislikes roiling beneath the surface of the political waters. I was surprised to learn the depth of Schlesinger’s hatred for Jimmy Carter, who has been sanctified since leaving office, but who deeply alienated New York liberals. “The long national nightmare is finally over,” he wrote on the day the Reagan era began. In fact, Schlesinger seems to have slightly preferred Reagan, which will shock loyalists.

But Schlesinger survives the 1980’s—as we all did—by finding comedy in unexpected places: He begins to be invited to Mick Jagger’s parties, with no idea why, or what to do upon arrival. Then there’s the uplift of the Clinton years, which brought him back into the circle of presidential consultation and celebration that he loved. The Wheel had spun, and all was right with the world again.

Of course, the world did not exactly end in 2000, despite the millennium, and it would have been interesting to read the daily reactions of this lion in winter to the Bush administration. But much of what he thought is already in the public record, through Op-Eds and his recent book, War and the American Presidency, which blasted the doctrine of preventive war. His Journals offer plentiful clues to what he would think about current and future events, from the dangers of presidents who cite thin causes for war (a concern during the L.B.J. years), to Henry Kissinger’s belief, articulated way back in 1977, that “Donald Rumsfeld was the rottenest person he had known in government.”

Schlesinger occasionally interrupts his impossibly full life to privately confide feelings of loss and futility—not entirely surprising after seeing so many of his closest friends cut down for one reason or another. But as one of them, Reinhold Niebuhr, explained, “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime.” After Niebuhr died in 1971, Schlesinger wrote in his journal, “We are bound to go back to Niebuhr, because we cannot escape the dark heart of man and because we cannot permit an awareness of this darkness to inhibit action and abolish hope.” For the same reason, we are bound to go back to Schlesinger, perhaps even more than when he was alive. Thanks to this volume, we have a great deal to go back to.

Ted Widmer directs the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He was a speechwriter and senior adviser to President Clinton.

I never did either. I ended up writing on the same fecund period, and was bowled over with gratitude when Arthur wrote a blurb for my first book, about Jacksonian New York (a far duller one than he ever wrote). Then, to my amazement, my career began to follow some of the grooves he had carved at mid-century. I got little history articles accepted by newspapers and magazines, and ultimately was hired by the Clinton White House to be a speechwriter. Those were heady days. Arthur was still legendary in Washington, especially inside an administration that regarded the J.F.K. precedent with respect and recognition. Arthur came to White House events now and then, and though the decades had brought a little curvature, his wit was still rapier, and he could cast a spell over any dinner companion with his ability to summon a memory from the various pasts he had access to: 1962, or 1933, or 1837. Really, there’s no point in specifying—all of American history was seamless to him.

I remember attending a glittering party at Kay Graham’s house one night with another Clinton speechwriter. Arthur beamed at us and said, “The President’s Praetorian Guard!” I bet it had been said about him once, and he had filed the words away. Not many people walk around with perfectly spelled diphthongs in their head, but Arthur was special.

I stayed with the Clinton White House until the last day, then went off to teach in a tiny college on the eastern shore of Maryland. A few weeks later, the phone rang, and Arthur was inviting me to lunch in New York. Of course I went; there were no longer any world crises to respond to. As I recall, we didn’t even look at the menu. By a strange alchemy, two very strong martinis simply arrived at our table, and then two steaks. As my head began to swim, Arthur made his pitch: He was editing a new biographical series covering all the U.S. Presidents, and he thought I was the perfect person to do one of the biggest of the lot. I waited in breathless anticipation, but couldn’t quite understand when it seemed like he was saying “Martin Van Buren.”

Arthur was right, as usual. I had a great time with the project, digging up lots of new stories about a President almost no one had ever paid attention to. No one except Arthur—Van Buren was a special favorite of his. He had a deft touch as an editor, and the follow-up lunches were all highly entertaining, martini-flavored affairs. Our conversations coincided with the run-up to the war in Iraq, and it was so refreshing, in that invertebrate time, to hear a real thinker poking holes in all of the lies that the Bush administration was summoning, with pompous grandiloquence, to justify its invasion. He was especially sarcastic about the rationale that we had to rush to war in March 2003 because the weather would be too hot later in the year for our soldiers to feel comfortable.

One always pulls down the old books at a moment like this, seeking contact with a friend. In one of them, The Politics of Hope (1963), there’s an essay that Arthur wrote about Bernard De Voto, another gifted historian too seldom read. He ended the essay with a passage that De Voto had written about Mark Twain, but which also seemed to be about Arthur himself, and the great historian who’d inspired him. I repeat it here, with the same feeling of gratitude:

“Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom. Say rather that, when he looked at the human race, he saw no ranked battalion of the angels …. Say that with a desire however warm and with the tenderness of a lover, he nevertheless understood that the heart of a man is wayward, a dark forest. Say that it is not repudiation he comes to at last, but reconciliation—an assertion that democracy is not a pathway to the stars but only the articles of war under which the race fights an endless battle with itself.”

But this Norman Rockwell story was nearly thrown off track in 2002, when serious allegations of plagiarism were leveled at Ms. Goodwin. She wasn’t the only high-flying historian brought down to earth over ethics—Stephen Ambrose also borrowed from the work of others, and Joseph Ellis lied about his past. But that didn’t make the charges any less painful. Like Mr. Ellis, who profiled George Washington last year, Ms. Goodwin has scraped away some of the tarnish by writing a book about the most virtuous American. When your honesty is in doubt, there’s really only one person to turn to. Where else would George W. Bush have unfurled the “Mission Accomplished” banner but on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln?

The 19th century was terra incognita to Ms. Goodwin, darker and less telegenic than the era of the Roosevelts and the Kennedys. But she went after Lincoln with her usual pit-bull tenacity, and now, a decade after beginning the project, it’s here, all 916 pages of it.

Typically, she’s already drawn far more attention than any ordinary historian could expect. The film rights have been acquired by Stephen Spielberg. Liam Neeson (once described, disturbingly, as a “sequoia of sex”) is slated to star—and a good thing, too: In a recent interview with USA Today, Ms. Goodwin gushed over a photograph of Lincoln at age 48, cooing that he looked “vital, alive, even sexy … I don’t want to sound embarrassing, but he looks sensual.” You can be sure that when someone begins a sentence with “I don’t want to sound embarrassing,” that the rest of the sentence will do exactly that.

There will be other moments of discomfiture. Because she sits on the board of Northwest Airlines (to the tune of $25K a year), a union of striking airplane mechanics has vowed to picket her, handing out leaflets that read “The Great Emancipator Meets a Great Prevaricator.” This kind of thing simply doesn’t happen to your average historian.

But above all the background noise, there’s still a book to be read, and for admirers of Ms. Goodwin, the news is good. This is a serious biography that ranges across an immense territory. It has flaws, to be sure, and there may not be many surprises if you already know Lincoln well—although I was pleased to learn that our 16th President enjoyed bowling. Ms. Goodwin has read widely and deeply, and retains her ability to write about complicated events with a pleasing narrative that will draw in readers by the swarm.

As its title suggests, Team of Rivals is a group portrait of sorts, an 1860’s version of The Wise Men or Rise of the Vulcans. Ms. Goodwin has tailored her plot around four contenders for the throne—specifically, the 1860 Republican nomination. In addition to Lincoln, who conveniently appears at the outset as the least likely to win the prize, the book details the careers of New York’s William Seward, Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase and Missouri’s Edward Bates. All were important power brokers in the decade leading up to 1860, all failed to stop Lincoln’s rise, and all joined him as essential cabinet officers (serving as Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury and U.S. Attorney General, respectively).

In theory, it’s a nice idea, and it gets us away from the well-trod path of traditional Lincoln biography. But in practice, it’s difficult to pull off, for the simple reason that Lincoln overwhelms his rivals on the page, as he did in politics. Ms. Goodwin gamely tries to engage the reader with long sections on Bates and Chase, but the more effort she puts into it (with Bates especially), the more narcotic the effect.

Seward is a different story: Here, to be sure, is a ripe subject for a future biography—one of New York’s all-time greats, a visionary of foreign policy and a profound thinker whose guidance was an essential spur to Lincoln’s greatness. Henry Adams wrote that Seward would “inspire a cow with statesmanship.” Reading the story of how Seward and Lincoln composed the stunning final paragraph of Lincoln’s first inaugural is intensely moving.

In the long run, even Seward is swamped by Lincoln’s wake. Ms. Goodwin’s story, in a nutshell, is that Lincoln was a master politician who used these hard-charging rivals for his own purposes. That’s not exactly news, but she tells it well, and in so doing, echoes some of her earlier work. In particular, Lincoln towers above the landscape as a primordial L.B.J., coming out of the West to tame Washington and play its most skillful politicians off each other. She spends a lot of time with his raw physical presence, and dwells at length on his strange combination of ugliness and animal magnetism.

Her other books are in here as well. Diagrams of the White House and stories about visitors echo the domestic architecture she painted with verve in her portrait of F.D.R.’s Presidency, No Ordinary Time (1994). And her interest in family relationships suggests some of the tribalism that flavored The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987). For all of these politicians, children and spouses were essential props, and her account of the deep bond between Salmon P. Chase and his precocious daughter Kate sounds like Ms. Goodwin’s own memoir of learning to keep score at baseball games with her father.

Wait a minute, she’s plagiarized again! From herself!

In retelling Lincoln’s familiar story, Ms. Goodwin has probed a vast trove of contemporary sources. The frontispiece includes comments from two New York newspapers: an 1860 article from the Herald that calls Lincoln “a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar,” and a 1909 piece that Tolstoy wrote for The World insisting that “he was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together.” The journey from that first quotation to the second is more or less the plot of the book.

Most of the arguments and information unearthed are familiar to Lincoln historians, so it would be wrong to call Team of Rivals profoundly original. There’s no feeling of new voices speaking—the feeling that Douglas L. Wilson created with Honor’s Voice (1998), his enthralling account of the young Lincoln. There are no arresting new theories, and, in fact, Ms. Goodwin dismisses all unorthodox attempts to get at Lincoln, from the gay-Lincoln school to the new work on Lincoln’s severe battles with depression by Joshua Wolf Shenk.

That’s her prerogative—and her wide-eyed reverence for the past is part of her popularity. But if something is gained by her readable, even-keeled account, something is lost as well. I found Lincoln’s bottomless complexity as intact after reading this as before, mainly because her exuberant rush to get at everyday events didn’t leave room for deep analysis of the human being at the center of them. Now and then, she quotes from a contemporary (John Hay, for example) who ruminated deeply about this gigantic paradox of a man—but she doesn’t reveal her own innermost thoughts. She concludes her introduction with this: Lincoln “has unequalled power … to inspire emotion.” That’s it?

I’m not sure that anyone has succeeded in capturing the essential Lincoln—a fact that many of his colleagues complained of as well. Hay wrote that his contemporaries “know no more of him than an owl does of a comet, staring into his blinking eyes.” It’s true that Team of Rivals is more a chronicle than a biography, and that Ms. Goodwin is more in love with politics than metaphysics. But she does politics very well, and no story of Lincoln should stray too far from the roar of the crowd. Her account of the 1860 Republican convention is spellbinding. It was there that her four contenders squared off (Seward’s supporters had the champagne on ice), and there that they all learned the full measure of the man we’ve come to venerate, justifiably, above all others in our history.

The Thanksgiving season seems a good time to welcome Lincoln back into our homes: not just because he invented the holiday, but out of gratitude that a President this capable ever existed at all. At every stage, Lincoln chose his strongest rivals as his closest advisors—precisely because he valued truth over expediency. If some melancholy pervades this book, it’s not merely Lincoln’s depression, or the carnage he presided over, or the knowledge that he’ll once again lay his life on the altar of the Union when the story ends. It’s all that—but also the guilty knowledge that the republic he worked so hard to save hasn’t lived up to the standards that he exhorted Americans to understand and to live by. Still, we’re a resilient people. As Lincoln’s career proves—and perhaps Ms. Goodwin’s as well—redemption often stalks very closely behind tragedy.

Ted Widmer is director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

But this Norman Rockwell story was nearly thrown off track in 2002, when serious allegations of plagiarism were leveled at Ms. Goodwin. She wasn’t the only high-flying historian brought down to earth over ethics—Stephen Ambrose also borrowed from the work of others, and Joseph Ellis lied about his past. But that didn’t make the charges any less painful. Like Mr. Ellis, who profiled George Washington last year, Ms. Goodwin has scraped away some of the tarnish by writing a book about the most virtuous American. When your honesty is in doubt, there’s really only one person to turn to. Where else would George W. Bush have unfurled the “Mission Accomplished” banner but on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln?

The 19th century was terra incognita to Ms. Goodwin, darker and less telegenic than the era of the Roosevelts and the Kennedys. But she went after Lincoln with her usual pit-bull tenacity, and now, a decade after beginning the project, it’s here, all 916 pages of it.

Typically, she’s already drawn far more attention than any ordinary historian could expect. The film rights have been acquired by Stephen Spielberg. Liam Neeson (once described, disturbingly, as a “sequoia of sex”) is slated to star—and a good thing, too: In a recent interview with USA Today, Ms. Goodwin gushed over a photograph of Lincoln at age 48, cooing that he looked “vital, alive, even sexy … I don’t want to sound embarrassing, but he looks sensual.” You can be sure that when someone begins a sentence with “I don’t want to sound embarrassing,” that the rest of the sentence will do exactly that.

There will be other moments of discomfiture. Because she sits on the board of Northwest Airlines (to the tune of $25K a year), a union of striking airplane mechanics has vowed to picket her, handing out leaflets that read “The Great Emancipator Meets a Great Prevaricator.” This kind of thing simply doesn’t happen to your average historian.

But above all the background noise, there’s still a book to be read, and for admirers of Ms. Goodwin, the news is good. This is a serious biography that ranges across an immense territory. It has flaws, to be sure, and there may not be many surprises if you already know Lincoln well—although I was pleased to learn that our 16th President enjoyed bowling. Ms. Goodwin has read widely and deeply, and retains her ability to write about complicated events with a pleasing narrative that will draw in readers by the swarm.

As its title suggests, Team of Rivals is a group portrait of sorts, an 1860’s version of The Wise Men or Rise of the Vulcans. Ms. Goodwin has tailored her plot around four contenders for the throne—specifically, the 1860 Republican nomination. In addition to Lincoln, who conveniently appears at the outset as the least likely to win the prize, the book details the careers of New York’s William Seward, Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase and Missouri’s Edward Bates. All were important power brokers in the decade leading up to 1860, all failed to stop Lincoln’s rise, and all joined him as essential cabinet officers (serving as Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury and U.S. Attorney General, respectively).

In theory, it’s a nice idea, and it gets us away from the well-trod path of traditional Lincoln biography. But in practice, it’s difficult to pull off, for the simple reason that Lincoln overwhelms his rivals on the page, as he did in politics. Ms. Goodwin gamely tries to engage the reader with long sections on Bates and Chase, but the more effort she puts into it (with Bates especially), the more narcotic the effect.

Seward is a different story: Here, to be sure, is a ripe subject for a future biography—one of New York’s all-time greats, a visionary of foreign policy and a profound thinker whose guidance was an essential spur to Lincoln’s greatness. Henry Adams wrote that Seward would “inspire a cow with statesmanship.” Reading the story of how Seward and Lincoln composed the stunning final paragraph of Lincoln’s first inaugural is intensely moving.

In the long run, even Seward is swamped by Lincoln’s wake. Ms. Goodwin’s story, in a nutshell, is that Lincoln was a master politician who used these hard-charging rivals for his own purposes. That’s not exactly news, but she tells it well, and in so doing, echoes some of her earlier work. In particular, Lincoln towers above the landscape as a primordial L.B.J., coming out of the West to tame Washington and play its most skillful politicians off each other. She spends a lot of time with his raw physical presence, and dwells at length on his strange combination of ugliness and animal magnetism.

Her other books are in here as well. Diagrams of the White House and stories about visitors echo the domestic architecture she painted with verve in her portrait of F.D.R.’s Presidency, No Ordinary Time (1994). And her interest in family relationships suggests some of the tribalism that flavored The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987). For all of these politicians, children and spouses were essential props, and her account of the deep bond between Salmon P. Chase and his precocious daughter Kate sounds like Ms. Goodwin’s own memoir of learning to keep score at baseball games with her father.

Wait a minute, she’s plagiarized again! From herself!

In retelling Lincoln’s familiar story, Ms. Goodwin has probed a vast trove of contemporary sources. The frontispiece includes comments from two New York newspapers: an 1860 article from the Herald that calls Lincoln “a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar,” and a 1909 piece that Tolstoy wrote for The World insisting that “he was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together.” The journey from that first quotation to the second is more or less the plot of the book.

Most of the arguments and information unearthed are familiar to Lincoln historians, so it would be wrong to call Team of Rivals profoundly original. There’s no feeling of new voices speaking—the feeling that Douglas L. Wilson created with Honor’s Voice (1998), his enthralling account of the young Lincoln. There are no arresting new theories, and, in fact, Ms. Goodwin dismisses all unorthodox attempts to get at Lincoln, from the gay-Lincoln school to the new work on Lincoln’s severe battles with depression by Joshua Wolf Shenk.

That’s her prerogative—and her wide-eyed reverence for the past is part of her popularity. But if something is gained by her readable, even-keeled account, something is lost as well. I found Lincoln’s bottomless complexity as intact after reading this as before, mainly because her exuberant rush to get at everyday events didn’t leave room for deep analysis of the human being at the center of them. Now and then, she quotes from a contemporary (John Hay, for example) who ruminated deeply about this gigantic paradox of a man—but she doesn’t reveal her own innermost thoughts. She concludes her introduction with this: Lincoln “has unequalled power … to inspire emotion.” That’s it?

I’m not sure that anyone has succeeded in capturing the essential Lincoln—a fact that many of his colleagues complained of as well. Hay wrote that his contemporaries “know no more of him than an owl does of a comet, staring into his blinking eyes.” It’s true that Team of Rivals is more a chronicle than a biography, and that Ms. Goodwin is more in love with politics than metaphysics. But she does politics very well, and no story of Lincoln should stray too far from the roar of the crowd. Her account of the 1860 Republican convention is spellbinding. It was there that her four contenders squared off (Seward’s supporters had the champagne on ice), and there that they all learned the full measure of the man we’ve come to venerate, justifiably, above all others in our history.

The Thanksgiving season seems a good time to welcome Lincoln back into our homes: not just because he invented the holiday, but out of gratitude that a President this capable ever existed at all. At every stage, Lincoln chose his strongest rivals as his closest advisors—precisely because he valued truth over expediency. If some melancholy pervades this book, it’s not merely Lincoln’s depression, or the carnage he presided over, or the knowledge that he’ll once again lay his life on the altar of the Union when the story ends. It’s all that—but also the guilty knowledge that the republic he worked so hard to save hasn’t lived up to the standards that he exhorted Americans to understand and to live by. Still, we’re a resilient people. As Lincoln’s career proves—and perhaps Ms. Goodwin’s as well—redemption often stalks very closely behind tragedy.

Ted Widmer is director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

Of course, no one would ever call Melville obscure. Moby-Dick has been interpreted by everyone from John Huston to Led Zeppelin to Laurie Anderson. “Bartleby the Scrivener” is familiar to anyone who’s ever written a high-school essay on alienation—or, more likely, preferred not to.

Yet the full contours of Melville’s life remain only dimly understood to all but a fanatical band of Melville admirers. He’s famous, yet difficult to know, lacking Whitman’s easy camaraderie, or Poe’s cult appeal, or the smoothness of his more successful friend, the 19th century’s blue-eyed darling, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Now, perhaps, that will change. At long last, Melville is poised to emerge as a flesh-and-blood figure, and a New Yorker to boot, thanks to Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work, the finest biography ever written of this essential American.

To be sure, there are already plenty of biographies out there. They came chockablock in the 1920’s, after Melville’s rediscovery by writers seeking a more potent American tradition than Longfellow’s lachrymose verse about the shores of Gitchee Gumee. There have also been ultra-biographical reference books chronicling Melville’s every appearance on the page of history—books that resemble Melville’s own parodies of the knowledge business. Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log is still indispensable; and Hershel Parker, the dean of Melville scholars, finally finished in 2002 his two-volume doorstop that, while awesome in its way, also led one to wonder at what point a fact becomes too small to merit inclusion.

The glut of information seems remarkable when you think of the complete anonymity into which Melville faded during his own lifetime. But even with this welcome new material, most biographies over the last generation—particularly those coming from academic precincts—have failed to capture the spirit of his magnificent struggle. There’s a nice line in Moby-Dick about the futility of information overload: “Why then do you try to ‘enlarge’ your mind? Subtilize it.” That is precisely what Mr. Delbanco has achieved, building the most real—and thrilling—Melville we have seen to date.

Andrew Delbanco has been chasing Melville for a long time. Like this reviewer, he studied under an extraordinary Harvard teacher, Alan Heimert, who filled a generation of students with such excitement and dread that they never got over it (one student, Peter Benchley, created Jaws in the image of Moby-Dick, and a gruff protagonist, Quint, in the image of Heimert). Since moving to Columbia two decades ago, Mr. Delbanco has kept alive that university’s tradition of nurturing public intellectuals who move easily between centuries and disciplines—Trilling and Hofstadter spring to mind. Like a photographer, he enjoys the interplay between light and dark. His book on evil, The Death of Satan (1995), offered a useful primer well before the word “evil” began turning up routinely in Presidential speeches. His essay on hope, The Real American Dream (1999), was shorter—perhaps appropriately. Anyone interested in both extremes usually ends up reading Melville, who voiced the most soaring ambition for America’s greatness and the bitterest disappointment when things fell apart, as they were when he was writing his masterpiece.

True to its subject, this is an unorthodox book. Melville has always drawn the iconoclasts. Orson Welles directed a stage version of Moby-Dick, revived this summer in East Hampton. Peter Ustinov directed a brilliant film version of Billy Budd in 1962, filled with ambivalent reflections on Cold War tensions. Camus, Kubrick, Robert Lowell and Maurice Sendak are all in the club. Mr. Delbanco fits comfortably inside this not-very-academic tradition. From the beginning, he strikes an in-your-face posture: The opening montage lists quotes about Melville from his own father (“He is very backward in speech”) to The Sopranos to former counterterror czar Richard Clarke (“Maybe I’m becoming like Captain Ahab with bin Laden as the white whale”). Melville would enjoy this mischief, which is much like his own.

Mr. Delbanco tells the life, straight. There’s no writer’s story quite like it in our annals. It’s a long life, connecting the aftermath of the Revolution (one of Melville’s grandfathers still had bits of tea that he had found on his clothes after the Boston Tea Party) to the lifetimes of Einstein, Picasso and Chaplin. And more than most, it shows the extraordinary capriciousness of fame and oblivion in American letters. With the possible exception of Zora Neale Hurston—buried in a pauper’s grave until Alice Walker repatriated her—no writer had to sink lower before coming back to his proper place in the firmament.

Melville burst onto the scene in 1846 with Typee, his sexy account of living with naked cannibals. Handsome, voluble, bearded, the Johnny Damon of his day, there seemed no limit to where he could go. He might have carved out a long career as a diverting conversationalist, entertaining New York’s merchants and their wives in the pretentious salons of the not-yet-Upper East Side. But it was precisely his ambition that did him in. Like Orson Welles, he harbored a desire for brilliance that was fatal to his commercial prospects, and to most of his friendships. Even among a circle of headstrong windbags, he distinguished himself by an immense New Yorkish impatience to succeed. More than to succeed—to astonish.

After a few mixed efforts, his ambition found an appropriately huge topic with the whale story he pursued, nearly as driven as his protagonist, in 1850 and 1851, as the Union was entering its death agonies. The book that resulted was so explosive that one can still find its flotsam and jetsam strewn around the world, from a brothel called Moby Dick Fun Pub in Belgium to a kebab restaurant in Tehran named after the novel.

Yet the public was utterly indifferent to Melville’s titanic effort, which marked the apogee of his career and left him stalled at the top of his climb, like a roller coaster just before a steep drop. The descent was swift. Pierre: or, The Ambiguities still delights readers as the model for how not to write a successful book.

He continued to pen short stories (including very brilliant ones) and then poems, and then bits of language that weren’t even really poetry at all, but simple thoughts in a word or two. And then nothing at all. For years, he eked out a humdrum existence as a Customs inspector on West Street, forced to take handwriting classes in hopes of getting a better performance rating. When he finally did expire in 1891, many were stunned that he had in fact been alive until then. But most paid no mind at all. An obituary in The New York Times identified him as “Henry Melville.”

Yes, it’s sad. But Mr. Delbanco resists the temptation to feel too sorry for him. There was always something Promethean about Melville’s thrust at greatness. He knew the odds were stacked against him. He knew the penalty for failure. But fortunately, the story doesn’t end there. After his death, a manuscript was discovered in a tin breadbox—the immortal Billy Budd—and his rediscovery began. It’s never stopped—and, as this book proves, we’ll always have more to learn about Melville.

Mr. Delbanco is very gifted at drawing links between Melville’s works and the larger paroxysms that his country was going through. It wouldn’t work for all writers, but it does work here—for Melville was undeniably paying attention. This book brings out the unbearable tension Americans felt over race in the decade before the Civil War. Mr. Delbanco’s treatment of “Benito Cereno” is particularly arresting. He also reasserts Melville’s closeness to the ground zero of the slavery argument—his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, was a Massachusetts judge who wrote the decision that served as the precedent for Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized segregation.

Another great gift of this book is that it returns Melville to his native city. New York has been slow to claim him, perhaps because of some uncertainty over whether he, in fact, claimed it. But he did, over and over again. He was born here, became an author here, published here and died here. He was a true isolato—to use his word for people who are islands unto themselves. But that word could also be used in a happier sense, to describe both this island and the fellow Manhattanites that Melville liked to walk among, anonymously.

Mr. Delbanco restores a sense of Melville the reporter, noticing (as so many did not) the problems of New York’s rapid growth as well as the joys of living here. He notes especially how much Melville and his friends borrowed from the fast language of the city’s streets. With great enthusiasm, one of them recorded into his journal what is probably the earliest known use of the expression “eat shit.” (Translated into Latin, it would serve nicely as a motto on the city seal.) Even after his writing slowed, Melville was in the thick of it, watching boats unload their cargoes, showing up day after day at a hard job. Whitman never did that.

It’s tempting to say that Melville was depressed: He lived through unspeakable tragedies—including the suicide of his son Malcolm—and there are whispers that he struggled with mental illness of his own. But this biography, with its relentless humanity (the final word of “Bartleby”), also draws aside the curtain of gloom and shows us a Melville who never quite gives up, who still haunts used bookstores, goes for endless walks around the city, and continues to write, secretly, brilliantly, right up to the end. Thank God for Billy Budd, which proves a critical fact: Billy may have died, but Melville did not succumb.

In his great essay on Hawthorne, Melville praised a writer who can “work on more than one level, not alternately but simultaneously, so as to reach not only the ‘superficial skimmer of pages,’ but also the ‘eagle-eyed reader.’” For its wealth of information, its lyrical writing and its unsparing judgment, Mr. Delbanco’s book will define Melville for both specialists and general readers well into the next generation. It goes unstintingly into his tragedy, and yet—true to form—it makes precious room for hope and laughter.

Not all ambitious quests into the heart of darkness end in failure. Herman Melville proved it with Moby-Dick. Andrew Delbanco has proved it with Melville.

Ted Widmer directs the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

Of course, no one would ever call Melville obscure. Moby-Dick has been interpreted by everyone from John Huston to Led Zeppelin to Laurie Anderson. “Bartleby the Scrivener” is familiar to anyone who’s ever written a high-school essay on alienation—or, more likely, preferred not to.

Yet the full contours of Melville’s life remain only dimly understood to all but a fanatical band of Melville admirers. He’s famous, yet difficult to know, lacking Whitman’s easy camaraderie, or Poe’s cult appeal, or the smoothness of his more successful friend, the 19th century’s blue-eyed darling, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Now, perhaps, that will change. At long last, Melville is poised to emerge as a flesh-and-blood figure, and a New Yorker to boot, thanks to Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work, the finest biography ever written of this essential American.

To be sure, there are already plenty of biographies out there. They came chockablock in the 1920’s, after Melville’s rediscovery by writers seeking a more potent American tradition than Longfellow’s lachrymose verse about the shores of Gitchee Gumee. There have also been ultra-biographical reference books chronicling Melville’s every appearance on the page of history—books that resemble Melville’s own parodies of the knowledge business. Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log is still indispensable; and Hershel Parker, the dean of Melville scholars, finally finished in 2002 his two-volume doorstop that, while awesome in its way, also led one to wonder at what point a fact becomes too small to merit inclusion.

The glut of information seems remarkable when you think of the complete anonymity into which Melville faded during his own lifetime. But even with this welcome new material, most biographies over the last generation—particularly those coming from academic precincts—have failed to capture the spirit of his magnificent struggle. There’s a nice line in Moby-Dick about the futility of information overload: “Why then do you try to ‘enlarge’ your mind? Subtilize it.” That is precisely what Mr. Delbanco has achieved, building the most real—and thrilling—Melville we have seen to date.

Andrew Delbanco has been chasing Melville for a long time. Like this reviewer, he studied under an extraordinary Harvard teacher, Alan Heimert, who filled a generation of students with such excitement and dread that they never got over it (one student, Peter Benchley, created Jaws in the image of Moby-Dick, and a gruff protagonist, Quint, in the image of Heimert). Since moving to Columbia two decades ago, Mr. Delbanco has kept alive that university’s tradition of nurturing public intellectuals who move easily between centuries and disciplines—Trilling and Hofstadter spring to mind. Like a photographer, he enjoys the interplay between light and dark. His book on evil, The Death of Satan (1995), offered a useful primer well before the word “evil” began turning up routinely in Presidential speeches. His essay on hope, The Real American Dream (1999), was shorter—perhaps appropriately. Anyone interested in both extremes usually ends up reading Melville, who voiced the most soaring ambition for America’s greatness and the bitterest disappointment when things fell apart, as they were when he was writing his masterpiece.

True to its subject, this is an unorthodox book. Melville has always drawn the iconoclasts. Orson Welles directed a stage version of Moby-Dick, revived this summer in East Hampton. Peter Ustinov directed a brilliant film version of Billy Budd in 1962, filled with ambivalent reflections on Cold War tensions. Camus, Kubrick, Robert Lowell and Maurice Sendak are all in the club. Mr. Delbanco fits comfortably inside this not-very-academic tradition. From the beginning, he strikes an in-your-face posture: The opening montage lists quotes about Melville from his own father (“He is very backward in speech”) to The Sopranos to former counterterror czar Richard Clarke (“Maybe I’m becoming like Captain Ahab with bin Laden as the white whale”). Melville would enjoy this mischief, which is much like his own.

Mr. Delbanco tells the life, straight. There’s no writer’s story quite like it in our annals. It’s a long life, connecting the aftermath of the Revolution (one of Melville’s grandfathers still had bits of tea that he had found on his clothes after the Boston Tea Party) to the lifetimes of Einstein, Picasso and Chaplin. And more than most, it shows the extraordinary capriciousness of fame and oblivion in American letters. With the possible exception of Zora Neale Hurston—buried in a pauper’s grave until Alice Walker repatriated her—no writer had to sink lower before coming back to his proper place in the firmament.

Melville burst onto the scene in 1846 with Typee, his sexy account of living with naked cannibals. Handsome, voluble, bearded, the Johnny Damon of his day, there seemed no limit to where he could go. He might have carved out a long career as a diverting conversationalist, entertaining New York’s merchants and their wives in the pretentious salons of the not-yet-Upper East Side. But it was precisely his ambition that did him in. Like Orson Welles, he harbored a desire for brilliance that was fatal to his commercial prospects, and to most of his friendships. Even among a circle of headstrong windbags, he distinguished himself by an immense New Yorkish impatience to succeed. More than to succeed—to astonish.

After a few mixed efforts, his ambition found an appropriately huge topic with the whale story he pursued, nearly as driven as his protagonist, in 1850 and 1851, as the Union was entering its death agonies. The book that resulted was so explosive that one can still find its flotsam and jetsam strewn around the world, from a brothel called Moby Dick Fun Pub in Belgium to a kebab restaurant in Tehran named after the novel.

Yet the public was utterly indifferent to Melville’s titanic effort, which marked the apogee of his career and left him stalled at the top of his climb, like a roller coaster just before a steep drop. The descent was swift. Pierre: or, The Ambiguities still delights readers as the model for how not to write a successful book.

He continued to pen short stories (including very brilliant ones) and then poems, and then bits of language that weren’t even really poetry at all, but simple thoughts in a word or two. And then nothing at all. For years, he eked out a humdrum existence as a Customs inspector on West Street, forced to take handwriting classes in hopes of getting a better performance rating. When he finally did expire in 1891, many were stunned that he had in fact been alive until then. But most paid no mind at all. An obituary in The New York Times identified him as “Henry Melville.”

Yes, it’s sad. But Mr. Delbanco resists the temptation to feel too sorry for him. There was always something Promethean about Melville’s thrust at greatness. He knew the odds were stacked against him. He knew the penalty for failure. But fortunately, the story doesn’t end there. After his death, a manuscript was discovered in a tin breadbox—the immortal Billy Budd—and his rediscovery began. It’s never stopped—and, as this book proves, we’ll always have more to learn about Melville.

Mr. Delbanco is very gifted at drawing links between Melville’s works and the larger paroxysms that his country was going through. It wouldn’t work for all writers, but it does work here—for Melville was undeniably paying attention. This book brings out the unbearable tension Americans felt over race in the decade before the Civil War. Mr. Delbanco’s treatment of “Benito Cereno” is particularly arresting. He also reasserts Melville’s closeness to the ground zero of the slavery argument—his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, was a Massachusetts judge who wrote the decision that served as the precedent for Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized segregation.

Another great gift of this book is that it returns Melville to his native city. New York has been slow to claim him, perhaps because of some uncertainty over whether he, in fact, claimed it. But he did, over and over again. He was born here, became an author here, published here and died here. He was a true isolato—to use his word for people who are islands unto themselves. But that word could also be used in a happier sense, to describe both this island and the fellow Manhattanites that Melville liked to walk among, anonymously.

Mr. Delbanco restores a sense of Melville the reporter, noticing (as so many did not) the problems of New York’s rapid growth as well as the joys of living here. He notes especially how much Melville and his friends borrowed from the fast language of the city’s streets. With great enthusiasm, one of them recorded into his journal what is probably the earliest known use of the expression “eat shit.” (Translated into Latin, it would serve nicely as a motto on the city seal.) Even after his writing slowed, Melville was in the thick of it, watching boats unload their cargoes, showing up day after day at a hard job. Whitman never did that.

It’s tempting to say that Melville was depressed: He lived through unspeakable tragedies—including the suicide of his son Malcolm—and there are whispers that he struggled with mental illness of his own. But this biography, with its relentless humanity (the final word of “Bartleby”), also draws aside the curtain of gloom and shows us a Melville who never quite gives up, who still haunts used bookstores, goes for endless walks around the city, and continues to write, secretly, brilliantly, right up to the end. Thank God for Billy Budd, which proves a critical fact: Billy may have died, but Melville did not succumb.

In his great essay on Hawthorne, Melville praised a writer who can “work on more than one level, not alternately but simultaneously, so as to reach not only the ‘superficial skimmer of pages,’ but also the ‘eagle-eyed reader.’” For its wealth of information, its lyrical writing and its unsparing judgment, Mr. Delbanco’s book will define Melville for both specialists and general readers well into the next generation. It goes unstintingly into his tragedy, and yet—true to form—it makes precious room for hope and laughter.

Not all ambitious quests into the heart of darkness end in failure. Herman Melville proved it with Moby-Dick. Andrew Delbanco has proved it with Melville.

Ted Widmer directs the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

Presidents move in the polls long after they leave office, and armchair historians can hold endless conversations about who belongs with the great, the near great and the mass of lesser mortals. Harry Truman departed the White House with abysmal ratings, but 50 years later, thanks to a series of engaging books about his colorful personality, he ranks as one of the most popular Presidents of the 20th century, revered by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Where Bill Clinton fits into the ebb and flow of history is not yet known. The very word "history" is still a bit awkward with this extraordinarily mobile man, moving across the globe at warp speed on behalf of AIDS and tsunami victims and still moving, despite 13 years of unprecedented exposure, in the hearts of the American people.

John Harris' important new book is without doubt a sign that history, with all its plodding seriousness, is catching up to the go-go 90's. That's good news. For too long, since Mr. Clinton began his improbable run, this supersized American story has been distorted by extremist views, particularly from the right, which continues to wipe out forests in its zeal to publish as much defamatory material on the Clintons as it can find or fabricate.

Neither side will be entirely happy with The Survivor, which is probably just right. At the end of the day, this is a smart reflection on those mercurial years from one of Washington's best reporters (importantly, one who came of age under Mr. Clinton). It's scrupulously researched; it's well-written; and, to a surprising degree, it's calm-not an adjective we usually find in Clintonland.

I was there for many of the events Mr. Harris witnessed, perceiving them through the parallel but quite distinct lens of a speechwriter. It's incredible how distant it all feels at times-another century, and another country as well: We were such a different nation when Mr. Clinton came to Washington that we almost need a passport to get back to it. But every now and then, I'll discover a piece of confetti in a suit pocket and realize that parade in Accra or Sofia or Tegucigalpa really happened.

Not quite a biography, The Survivor is a comprehensive inside portrait of the Clinton Presidency. As we might expect from a Washington Post reporter, there's a lot of politics here, the endless give and take with friends and enemies to push through legislation-not so different from your average West Wing episode. There's also a narrative arc, familiar to readers of 19th-century novels, of a talented protagonist who enters a dangerous city, is beset by problems of his own making and snares laid by others, survives a near-fatal crisis and emerges a changed person. There's quite a lot on the Lewinsky crisis, which Mr. Harris experienced up close. There are also insightful reflections on the Presidency, the eight years and the man himself.

It was a long eight years, as Mr. Clinton's admirers and detractors can both safely agree. (There are 76 million pages of documents in Little Rock to prove it.) It was also an important time of transition, one that we haven't fully come to grips with yet. Mr. Harris does a good job reminding us of the feel as well as the facts of those years. And he persuasively asserts that the entire tenor of the decade-to-be changed when Mr. Clinton forced a reluctant Congress (including zero Republicans) to adopt his program of fiscal discipline in 1993, leading to the prosperity that will always provide a sparkly backdrop to the Clinton story.

That's one of several compliments Mr. Harris pays to Mr. Clinton. The book is carefully calibrated and avoids emotional extremes, but the grudging respect of its title becomes clearer by the book's end. Mr. Harris reminds us of the unpopularity of the courageous decision to bail out the Mexican peso, and steps back now and then with some astonishment to comment on how much good policy was enacted. He also admires Mr. Clinton's foreign policy, generally ignored by the commentariat, and this marks a genuine step forward for The Survivor. There were obvious early missteps in Somalia and Haiti, and a disastrous failure to intervene in Rwanda, but Mr. Harris detects growing confidence from Bosnia onward, as well as a clear international vision for America's importance on the world stage.

Because he knows the eight years so well, Mr. Harris avoids a pitfall that has tripped up previous writers-namely, to interpret the entire administration through the prism of 1993, when pizza boxes were piled around the White House and rancorous discussions divided staffers who looked too young for their jobs. Mr. Harris discerns roughly five major phases-the frenzy of 1993, the overreach and disaster of 1994, the recovery of 1995-97, the crisis of 1998 and the re-recovery of 1999-2000. He notes correctly that Mr. Clinton is the only President in recent memory-and perhaps the only one save Lincoln and F.D.R.-to enjoy as much popularity at the end of his term as at the beginning.

Given the vastness of Mr. Clinton's Presidency, it's perhaps unfair to expect Mr. Harris to cover it all. Still, I had the feeling that some areas were inflated, presumably because of Mr. Harris' access (i.e., the Dick Morris saga), while others were unjustly neglected. Some major moments and ideas receive scant attention: the Arafat-Rabin handshake of 1993, the speech to an African-American church in Memphis, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Family and Medical Leave Act, AmeriCorps, Mr. Clinton's friendship with Ron Brown, to list only a few.

In my own not unbiased opinion, more attention could have been paid to the tangible ways that American lives were made better during those eight years, in ways ranging from education to crime prevention, job creation and conservation. It wasn't always the sexiest news, but it was happening every day. And after going into all of the scandals that dogged the Clinton team (as he should have), Mr. Harris could have been clearer about stating that no one was ever convicted of any felony relating to official wrongdoing-in stark contrast to the Reagan/Bush years. Hardly anyone noticed, but a few weeks ago, Henry Hyde expressed doubt about the impeachment trip that he and Tom DeLay took America on.

Surprisingly, Mr. Harris neglects some big-ticket items like the Good Friday Agreement, which changed Northern Ireland forever. Or North Korea, where Mr. Clinton and his team negotiated a complex agreement that wasn't perfect, but was indisputably better than our current broken diplomacy (at last count, North Korea may have up to six nukes that didn't exist in the 1990's, with more on the way). A bit more on Mr. Clinton's unusual standing with world leaders, and his almost superhuman capacity to goad enemies into making peace with each other (usually by keeping them awake with him, past the point of normal human endurance), would have made this a fuller book. It would also have provided a public service by reminding Americans that there once was a time when Presidents did this sort of thing: The Bush administration's next peace conference will be its first.

Mr. Harris is simply wrong about terrorism. He's usually the master of his material, and confident whether addressing Mr. Clinton's strengths or weaknesses. But here he seems unsure of himself, and unpersuasive when he argues that it was ultimately Mr. Clinton's fault that few heeded his very vocal warnings about Osama bin Laden and other terrorists. It was his fault for warning us? As I recall, the press corps was oblivious, and the Republican Congress simply opposed anything Mr. Clinton proposed. Then, after George W. Bush became President, when the G.O.P. had a chance to do something about terrorism, they slashed counterterrorism funding, ignored intelligence concerning Al Qaeda and chased after chimeras like a national missile-defense system.

I wish Mr. Harris had looked at another area of accomplishment. In 1992, the year of the Rodney King riots, the United States was a racially polarized nation. In 2000, that was no longer the case, and we don't have to look far for the reason: There wasn't a week in his Presidency that Bill Clinton didn't address in some way the unfinished legacy of the civil-rights movement. Black Americans understood from the start that a President was speaking to them with a level of intelligence and sustained commitment that they had never heard before, and are not likely to hear again until we elect an African-American President. I vividly remember a small ceremony that President Clinton held to restore the honorable discharge of a black soldier who had been unjustly cashiered a century ago. There was no media coverage, no political gain-he did it simply because it felt right.

That leads to a larger point, which is that Mr. Harris' clinical detachment-necessary for a print journalist-can lead him to ignore the mystical bond that united Mr. Clinton with the American people, and which still drives his powerful appeal. Does anyone doubt that he would defeat his successor if the 22nd Amendment were repealed? Mr. Harris excels at the inside hardball of politics-the chin music. But he doesn't always convey the other kind of music, the theatrics and laughter and empathy that Mr. Clinton did so well. In the last century, only F.D.R., Kennedy and Reagan can touch him for charisma. The Irish always understood this about him, and somewhere in my desk I have a crumpled piece of paper that Seamus Heaney gave me during a Clinton visit to Dublin, quoting an ancient bit of Irish poetry. "The music of what happens," wrote Finn McCool, "that is the most beautiful music of them all." Bill Clinton could hear those celestial harmonies; most of us cannot.

A great anecdote in The Survivor has Mr. Clinton telling Robert Rubin, the Secretary of the Treasury, to "get out and talk to real people." Mr. Rubin responded, "Am I a real person?"-to which Mr. Clinton answered, "No." Despite his heroic command of his subject, Mr. Harris retains a little Beltway unreality-aware of the unhealthy cynicism of the White House press briefing room, but not entirely able to free himself from it. He knows that Mr. Clinton was "a marvelously entertaining president," "always loading his plate a little higher at life's buffet." But he can't quite allow himself to surrender his suspicion. Oddly, very little of Mr. Clinton's own version of history, copiously available in My Life, makes it into The Survivor.

Obviously, no one can write a detailed political history and a potboiler at the same time. And it's unfair to ask Mr. Harris to relinquish the skepticism that reporters carry around like a notepad. But the very excellence of Mr. Harris' effort creates nostalgia for a book that doesn't yet exist-one that will tell Bill Clinton's story with less sound and fury, and more Faulkner. One thinks a little of All the King's Men, recently filmed in New Orleans, and one longs for a latter-day Robert Penn Warren, or Edwin O'Connor, or A.J. Liebling. Sin, perseverance, redemption-isn't that what America is all about?

Still, that wistful note shouldn't detract from Mr. Harris' achievement. He has set the bar high for all who come after him, and written a big book that's worthy of his talents and his subject. To quote the final line of All the King's Men, he has taken us "out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time."

History may be an argument without end, as Mr. Harris reminds us. Bill Clinton certainly is. Americans will continue to debate the complex man who led them for eight years at the end of the 20th century, for the simple reason that he'll be an ex-President for much longer than he was President. He'll loom especially large as 2008 approaches and the full damage of President Bush's domestic and foreign policies becomes clear. We will still find reasons to hate him and to love him, according to our needs. But thanks to this book, there's now a sounder basis to the argument, and some hope that the argument might even turn into a conversation.

Ted Widmer directs the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College. From 1997 to 2000, he was director of speechwriting at the National Security Council.

When George Bush launched his recent European charm offensive, he began his biggest speech with an attempt at levity. "I follow in some large footsteps," he reminded the solons of Brussels, describing the extraordinary impact of Benjamin Franklin's arrival in France during the American Revolution. With a reputation "more universal than Leibniz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire," and a character "more beloved and esteemed than any or all of them," Franklin charmed everyone he met, provoking an observer to write "there was scarcely a peasant or citizen who did not consider him as a friend to human kind." To guffaws, Mr. Bush said, "I've been hoping for a similar reception, but Secretary Rice told me I should be a realist." You have to give him points for audacity.

The key to any joke is its implausibility, and this was no exception. It is manifest that George Bush is no Ben Franklin, and probably just as true that Franklin is not Mr. Bush's kind of founder. Self-reliant, improvisatory, intellectually at ease, he was the President's polar opposite in most ways we can measure. He preferred knowledge to zeal, and people to dogmas, and women to men, and for all of those reasons he was the most successful diplomat in American history-a late chapter in his storied career that most Americans know little about.

It could be argued that we don't need a new Franklin biography-for the last few years, they've been dropping from the skies with alarming frequency. Since the 21st century started, H.W. Brands, Edmund Morgan, Walter Isaacson and Gordon Wood have all written serious books about him. Each was quite good in its way, but how much more can the market bear?

Stacy Schiff has provided a saucy answer to that question. Her new study insists that Franklin's embassy to Paris from 1776 to 1785 was more than important-it was essential to American history, for without it, the United States would never have come into existence. The unlikeliness of this book-which celebrates a triumph of Euro-American relations at a moment of profound mutual incomprehension-is exactly why it's welcome. Franklin once sketched a skeletal outline for his incomplete autobiography that included the ludicrously short statement "To France. Treaty, etc." Thanks to Ms. Schiff, those bones now have some meat on them.

She begins her account in the same place Mr. Bush did, with Franklin's arrival in France-though, as she points out, he was hardly triumphant on the day in December 1776, when he washed up on the shores of Brittany, more dead than alive. It's an odd place to begin a biography, and skips everything Franklin had done to that point, but allows her to cut to the chase. The plot is fairly straightforward: Franklin needs to win French support for the desperately underfunded Revolution and will resort to any means necessary. He flirts, he flatters, he writes little bagatelles, he grovels and growls according to the audience, and over the course of his French decade, he succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of the revolutionaries who sent him on this fool's errand. France recognized the United States, sent armaments and men to complete the effort, and made an implausible local rebellion into an international cause célèbre. Louis XVI eventually spent 1.3 billion livres backing the American Revolution, giving it life and unwittingly setting in motion a chain of events that would kill him and his family. Franklin may have been charming, but part of the lightning tamer's appeal was that he always seemed to be playing with fire-as Louis learned the hard way.

Franklin's success was even more remarkable given the obstacles he faced-a shiftless Congress that wouldn't pay its bills, an ocean separating him from news for months at a time, the threat of assassins lurking around every doorway, and spies who reported regularly on his actions to their English masters (an unexpected boon for historians). His biggest problem, in fact, may have been the Americans who were sent to help him, all of whom begrudged Franklin his celebrity (John Adams will come down a notch after this treatment), and some of whom actively worked against him, coming close to treason in the process.

But Franklin always had better friends than enemies. There were the brilliant Parisian women who formed an unlikely attachment to the aging, Strangelovian sex symbol, whose mangy marten-fur hat (to cover the boils on his head) sent the fashion world into such raptures that people starting cutting their hair to resemble it. Everything Franklin did was gossiped about-and gossip was a most important tool at a time when "all of Paris freely discussed the queen's menstruation, the king's erections, and Voltaire's urination." The great thinkers of the Enlightenment embraced him and his cause, and Louis' foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, seeing a chance to beard the British lion, steered countless favors toward the ill-clad courtier.

If Franklin was a most unrepresentative American-comfortable in Old World salons, multilingual, tolerant of moral lapses-then Vergennes was equally atypical of the ancien régime, working strenuously for his king night after night, humorless, disdainful of aristocratic follies. In their understanding-not quite a friendship-the steel of the alliance was forged. Franklin's genius consisted in keeping the American cause alive before the French public, even during the long spells between victories, through artful cultivation of his own celebrity. No other American diplomat approached either his fame or his tactical use of his fame-and none has come close since (though Condi Rice's recently revealed taste for dominatrix outfits is a creative step in that direction that Franklin would surely have savored).

Of course, the simple fact that the alliance succeeded and the U.S. came into existence should not be taken as evidence that the French and Americans truly understood each other. Ms. Schiff reminds us throughout the book how much ignorance lay at the core of the relationship. Versailles never quite grasped that this was, at bottom, a revolution against kings. French scientists, unaware of two centuries of English settlement, continued to describe Americans as "degenerate, feeble-minded iguana eaters" with tiny testicles. Some of Franklin's arguments will also strike modern readers as odd, including his sexually charged suggestion that America would make a most loving "wife" for her French "husband." But alliances, like all relationships, can survive utter incomprehension, and Franklin succeeded brilliantly in representing the idea of his country while concealing the inconvenient facts.

If there was a city on earth where ideas held more currency than facts, it was Paris in the 1770's. Though there was a great deal of frippery in the air (the dubious Mesmer was at peak popularity during Franklin's stay), the Enlightenment was still in full flower, and France was predisposed to find the newness of the American experiment exciting. Despite recent attempts to locate the birth of modern thought in Edinburgh and London, neither held a candle to Paris, which was the capital of something far bigger than France. Ms. Schiff succeeds nicely in vivifying this enormous, complicated place, pointing out its snares along with its lures (its more than 14,000 registered prostitutes would at times outnumber George Washington's puny army) and recapturing the intellectual excitement that was literally in the air. Near the end of his sojourn, Franklin was an eyewitness to the first human flight, the balloon ascent of the Montgolfiers in 1783. It seemed to fit perfectly with the unprecedented republic that he'd just ushered weightlessly into existence-and perhaps also to signal that everything ultimately has to come back down to earth.

Franklin was finally recalled to the newly independent United States, but an ingrate Congress infuriated him with its stingy rejection of the small personal favors he asked, and one wonders a little about his innermost feelings as he watched over the creation of the Constitution in 1787 and its subtle encouragement of slavery (which he began to denounce). When Franklin died in 1790, the ancien régime still existed, but its days were numbered, and the world would soon learn a fact that it continues to relearn on a daily basis: It's no simple matter to change the way a people are governed. To those who persist in believing that America sprang into existence unfettered, floating upwards on the basis of virtuous aspirations and billowy pronouncements about freedom, this story will offer a healthy corrective.

Like all books, this one has flaws, and the pace slows noticeably after the exciting developments of Franklin's first years in Paris, when the war really was up for grabs. It will be a hard slog for those who do not traffic in 18th-century history or who consider diplomacy somehow un-American. But uncomfortable truths are usually important, and it's bracing to learn not only that the U.S. depended on France, but that France delivered on her promises, and that a founder had the effrontery to fall in love with France while negotiating the first steps of our oldest, most complicated alliance.

A Great Improvisation will give Tom DeLay apoplexy, but it reminds us that the American Revolution was co-produced by the very country whose name our leaders can barely bring themselves to pronounce. It gives pause to realize that the U.S.A. sprang from a world of lapdogs, mincing courtiers and pet monkeys. But Franklin, with his taste for trenchant witticisms, would find that a perfectly logical beginning for the ongoing comedy of Franco-American relations.

Ted Widmer is the director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.