Mark Twain is an inexhaustible subject for biography. Every generation reads him and finds a different author: folk humorist, artist, controversialist, and (in certain quarters) racist. He is an academic industry – not just for critics, but also for editors who pour over his papers and annotate his immense body of unfinished, unpublished, and unparalleled work. Twain started out a local color writer along the lines of Bret Harte and as a public entertainer akin to Artemus Ward, but he became a worldwide phenomenon, touring the globe, giving concerts, so to speak, like a rock star – an analogy his latest biographer, Ron Powers, favors.

In “Mark Twain: A Life” (Free Press, 736 pages, $35), Mr. Powers hasn’t given the many previous biographers their due. He instead, in a prologue, trashes his predecessors, calling their work reductive even as he chides scholars for promoting their pet theories. Mr. Powers alone, it seems, has eschewed psychologizing and returned Twain to his place in literature and in history. Or so Mr. Powers’s prologue – really a fanfare – announces. This is silly, as Mr. Powers will shortly have to take his place in the long queue when Jerome Loving, at work right now on yet another life of Twain, presents his work.

It is also odd, as this biography is the result of prodigious scholarship, and in his acknowledgments at the back of the book Mr. Powers thanks many scholars for their help. He is very good at canvassing the best opinions on a subject and weighing the arguments. Mr. Powers is acute, for example, on charges that Twain was a racist. He’s read the opinions on both sides and, while he does not declare a position, he finds in favor of those who laud Twain’s moral imagination, arguing that he is the very opposite of a racist.

Similarly, Andrew Hoffman’s “Inventing Mark Twain” (1997), which ostensibly “outed” Twain, is given a respectful hearing, though ultimately dismissed as a book that misinterprets Twain’s male friendships. Mr. Powers also gives a nod here and there to the classic biography, Justin Kaplan’s “Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain” (1966), even though Mr. Kaplan’s decidedly Freudian forays are precisely what Mr. Powers purports to decry in his prologue. To be sure, he usually turns Mr. Kaplan into parentheses: “(Justin Kaplan has conjectured, arrestingly, that ‘by turning his dream life into a literary problem – into work – he saved himself from madness.’)”

Arresting, is it? What do we do with that? Mr. Powers is too fastidious to say.

Even more perplexing is the ghost biographer who is not even accorded parentheses. I mean that other Kaplan, Fred, author of “The Singular Mark Twain” (2003). Perhaps I missed a note somewhere that refers to the fugitive Mr. Kaplan, but I could find him only in Mr. Powers’s bibliography. This absence, to my mind, is telling, since Fred Kaplan’s biography also aimed to situate Twain in his time and to turn Justin Kaplan’s thesis about a Twain divided on its head. Perhaps Mr. Powers has some quarrel with Fred Kaplan, but I see their approaches as compatible and indeed reinforcing.

If Mr. Powers is not as original in his approach as he claims, he is, nevertheless, a mighty fine writer. I tend to agree with novelist Russell Banks, whose blurb has it that Mr. Powers has “written more than a biography. He’s written history.” Or as I would put it, he has accomplished that rare feat of fusing biography and history.

A case in point is Mr. Powers’s handling of William Dean Howells, who championed Twain early in his career, giving him space in the Atlantic Monthly – essentially a literary validation at the time. The story of the Twain-Howells friendship has been told many times, but Mr. Powers features their amity at the beginning of his biography and creates a rounded portrait of the “moist” and portly Howells, who is treated with great sensitivity in the recently published “William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life” by Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson. The symbiosis between him and Howells was absolutely crucial. Howells had the critical eye that Twain sometimes lacked; Twain had the verve and intensity that Howells never could muster with any consistency in his own fiction:

Without Howells’s friendship, Mark Twain might have flared for a while, a regional curiosity among many, and then faded, forgotten. On its legitimizing strength, he gained the foundation for international status as America’s Shakespeare and struck a template for the nation’s voice into the 20th century and beyond.

Twain, in other words, was no isolated genius, no simple self-starter.

Twain biographers tend to note the importance of his work as a printer in developing his command of language. But Mr. Powers is wonderfully graphic and syncretic on the subject:

The process of putting his fingers on molded metal letters, feeling their weight, and sliding them along precise rows into words and sentences as he smoked his outsize “Cigar” seems to have annealed him to language as a tactile presence in his hands. The paradigm of typesetting governed his prose writing and his handwriting, resonating with his speaking style. Even as torrentially fast as he worked, twenty manuscript pages a day in the throes of inspiration or need, his sentences were always constructed, never dashed off.

This kind of paragraph has a big pay-off much later in the biography when Mr. Powers describes how Huck Finn’s informal speech patterns were the elaborate product of constant revision, not spontaneous high spirits. Huck’s very fluency – the colloquial rhythms that Hemingway admired so much – was a product of sweated labor.

Twain the writer and the platform performer (another art form he worked at diligently) coalesce in Mr. Powers’s persuasive portrait. At first, I thought the biographer’s analogy to a rock star a little far fetched. But what he has in mind is Twain’s deliberately raucous patter – what some critics such as Matthew Arnold deplored as “coarse.” Twain was quite consciously leavening the Victorian formality and stiffness that most of his American contemporaries still thought of as “literature,” but unlike the local color writers and humorists of his age, he was not merely an imitator of dialect. On the contrary, he lifted everyday speech into poetic cadences.

In Mr. Powers’s biography, I was able to see Twain more clearly than ever before. There was a moment in one of Twain’s earliest platform performances in which he stumbled. He had a habit of observing his audiences keenly, and was disturbed when he noticed a couple getting up to leave. The audience laughed at his discomposure, and then Twain showed his true genius: He asked his audience where he had left off! They roared with delight.

There is also something uncanny about this biography. Having myself worked in a print shop, I felt again that cold metal in my hand even as Mr. Powers described what it was like for Twain to set type. Watching Twain on the platform through Mr. Powers’s prose, I suddenly recalled a scene that brought me as close to the living Twain as I could ever hope to be.

On a platform in Poland in 1980, a gruff William Saroyan paced back and forth, notebook in hand, regaling an audience of Fulbrighters with his impressions of Warsaw. He suddenly stopped, peered intently at us, looked at his notebook, looked at us, took a step toward us, tapped the notebook, shook his head, paused, and then said, pointing at the notebook, “Nothing there!” Before reading Mr. Powers, I didn’t understand that Saroyan could not have brought the house down without Mark Twain.

What Twain and his heirs did was fashion out of American idioms and the natural urge to perform a language that binds together a nation the same way an audience bonds with a performer. Mr. Powers has done something similar, reinvigorating our sense of the man who made the literature even as the literature made him.