Biography is backbreaking work. With modern figures it means countless interviews and visits to archives, time-consuming travel, and expense. Blessed is the biographer who can ride in the wake of his predecessors.

Still, some biographers are begrudging. They seldom acknowledge how much they owe other biographers. In part, this is a matter of marketing. What biographer wants to say, “X did a good job. And I want to build on that”? But it is always heartening to discover generous biographers, for they do the genre a service by making readers aware of what a cumulative and incremental enterprise it is.

In “Edmund Wilson: A Biography” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35), we get from Lewis Dabney the niggardly admission that he has profited from certain “details” in Jeffrey Meyers’s unauthorized “Edmund Wilson: A Biography”(1995).It would have cost Mr. Dabney very little (since he is the authorized biographer) to give Mr. Meyers his due as well as any comeuppance. Instead, Mr. Dabney does something rather cowardly: He relates Mr. Meyers’s failings as expressed by others.

This is a tightfisted and pusillanimous approach to biography, and it diminishes the genre. The belittling biographer occludes the continuity between generations of his fraternity. Leave this marketplace mentality to publishers, my fellow biographers, and in your acknowledgments do something to further an understanding of the genre’s development.

Mr. Dabney terms Mr. Meyers’s biography reductive; I would call it selective. Mr. Meyers is a professional biographer. He values the crisp sentence, the brisk precis, the paragraph that sings with revealing details. His biographies are honed. Mr. Meyers’s Wilson biography benefits from a kind of cumulative wisdom he acquired while writing biographies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Having also published biographies of Robert Frost, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, and others, Mr. Meyers has in effect created a biographical epic of Modern literature.

Mr. Dabney, on the other hand, writes as a friend of Wilson’s and as an adept. He writes perfectly acceptable, if too evenly measured, sentences. Every aspect of his subject must have its place – or else (horror of horrors) Mr. Dabney himself might be called “reductive.” He reminds me a bit of Joseph Blotner, the Faulkner biographer whose devotion to every aspect of his subject is so apparent in every sentence that the demands of biography as a genre are sacrificed.

Nevertheless, I revere Mr. Blotner because I want to know everything I can about Faulkner, and I expect there will be readers who feel the same about Mr. Dabney, since Wilson was one of the 20th century’s literary giants. But what of the so-called “general reader”? Many will have a hard time with Mr. Dabney. They want to know about one of the foremost American literary critics and historians, the author of major works such as “Axel’s Castle,” “The Triple Thinkers,” “The Wound and the Bow,” and “To the Finland Station,” but they also want to be moved along with dexterity and energy. For them, Mr. Dabney may be a little too stately, a little too complacent about his subject’s worthiness – like those Victorian authors of life-and-times biographies.

Is biography, then, just a matter of audience – one biography served up for scholars and another for everyone else? I think not. I cannot imagine that Mr. Dabney’s publisher wanted a book confined to an academic niche, and I’m sure Mr. Dabney himself wants to reach as many readers as possible.

So what happened? Mr. Dabney’s biography is not much longer than Mr. Meyers’s. But the passive voice makes it seem ponderous. This is not the sort of biography Wilson would have wanted. He wished literature to be arresting. He thought books should captivate readers, and the writer about books and bookmen should evoke a sense of literature and the literary life as an adventure everyone ought to know about. This is why “Axel’s Castle,” for example, an introduction to modern literature, remains in print and remains remarkably refreshing.

A biography of Edmund Wilson ought to have the same virtues. It should be accessible and engaging. Mr. Dabney uses the consecutive method – one damn thing after another – while Mr. Meyers might be deemed synergetic. What Mr. Meyers conveys in the following paragraph can only be gleaned by reading many pages of Mr. Dabney:

When Wilson emerged from the study, his idiosyncratic and didactic way of conversing combined the lectures he had heard in college with the cross-examination he had learned from his father [a distinguished attorney]. In a rather high-pitched, resonant voice, which had evolved from shouting to his deaf mother, and a stutter (or splutter) that developed when he got excited, Wilson, as straightforward in his conversation as in his prose, would ignore all small talk and come directly to the point. He was always writing about something, and while telling friends about his current enthusiasm, would work out his essay in his head. But he was also endlessly curious and voracious for knowledge. Less interested in people than in what he could learn from them, he would pick their brains in a gratifying way. One day in Cambridge, later in life, he asked Leon Edel, an authority on Henry James, to take him to James’ grave and discuss the life of the novelist on that sacred spot.

There is something Johnsonian in this paragraph – not so much in the cadence of the sentences as in their balance and continuity, beginning with “He was always.” And then to end on an anecdote that clinches this synoptic view of Wilson is about as winning a way to write biography as I know.

While Mr. Dabney recounts his subject’s life as a series of events, Mr. Meyers seems to have the whole man in his sights. Mr. Meyers goes gunning for his subjects – by which I do not mean he portrays his subject’s negatively but that they are “shot” or captured in deep focus.

A case in point is Edna St. Vincent Millay. She is a supporting actor in Wilson’s story, and we get a standard medium close-up of her in Mr. Dabney’s biography. Here is the elegant poetess and sexual adventurer who taught the young Wilson a thing or two about intercourse between men and women – as well as something about literature and life. Mr. Meyers, on the other hand, freeze-frames Millay for just a moment and makes her, as a person, stand out.

Repeating the familiar story that she had 18 lovers before Wilson – so many that Wilson suggested to one of her lovers that they should form an alumni association – Mr. Meyers notes that in fact a Millay biographer could only tabulate 14, and some of the men were homosexuals at that and probably don’t deserve their places on the list. Mr. Meyers’s skepticism helps to measure the discrepancy between the person and the legend. He does not doubt the transformative impact Millay had on Wilson, who lost his virginity to her, but her presence in Wilson’s biography is better grounded.

Then there is Mr. Meyers on Wilson’s foot fetishism. After two full paragraphs documenting how women’s feet excited his subject, Mr. Meyers shows how Wilson worked this obsession into his novel, “I Thought of Daisy,” using a simile many reviewers have commented upon: “I held her firm little insteps for a moment in my hands: in pale stockings, her tired and sweaty feet were like two little moist cream cheeses encased in covers of cloth.” You’ll find this passage in Mr. Dabney, too, but it is orphaned there without any context.

Having read Mr. Meyers on Wilson’s marriage to Mary McCarthy, I wondered if Mr. Dabney would share his predecessor’s skepticism that Wilson beat his wife black and blue. While making no excuses for Wilson’s alcoholism and mental cruelty, factors that contributed greatly to the couple’s divorce, Mr. Meyers portrayed Mc-Carthy as a hysteric who often invented brutal scenes that reflected her anxieties and fears but not the truth about her marital experience. In short, Mr. Meyers does not believe that Wilson – who was never accused of assaulting any of the other many women in his life and who denied McCarthy’s charges – hit his wife.

Less pointed than Mr. Meyers, Mr. Dabney characterizes McCarthy’s statements about Wilson as “contradictory.” He refers to her assertions and claims, and, when he thinks McCarthy is lying, he takes refuge in her friend Elizabeth Hardwick’s observation that Mary always thought she was telling the truth, but sometimes wasn’t. Now, just how far does that get us? Mr. Dabney will not quite commit himself, although to be fair he conducts a thorough account of the he said/she said controversy.

In sum, I wish Mr. Dabney had a tighter grip on his subject and his subject’s subjects (Wilson is a kingly character) and had given them a good shake. Mr. Meyers did just that, and there is no doubt that his biography remains the one to beat. There is, however, ample room for another Wilson biographer – less judgmental than Mr. Meyers and more interested in McCarthy’s motivations, for one example, rather than in discrediting her. We still need a biography that probes deeply into the psychology of a complex subject.