By Thomas Mallon

Any biography requires raw material, and archivally, Tom Wolfe seems to be a man in full.

A more likely living candidate for the full life-and-works treatment might be Tom Wolfe, still young in his subjects and style, but at 84 getting up there in years. True, one could say, as with Franzen, that this writer has put most of his exclamation points onto the page, not off it. A biographer of Wolfe will be reporting on an unscarifying boyhood; a late but long marriage; apparently amiable children; a domestic tranquillity that has supported immersive research and long intervals between hefty volumes. Even so, several aspects of the author’s long career make him ripe for scrutiny beyond the modest critical studies he’s prompted up to now.

Wolfe has been both in sync with his times — a key figure in the New Journalism that became the dominant mode of chronicling them — as well as a figure apart: His conservative inclinations alone distinguish him from most American writers of his generation. Well into midcareer he shifted away from nonfiction, glossing his first novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987), with a thumping manifesto titled “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” (1989). That essay planted Wolfe’s flag on the social and realist turf he believed the novel had long since foolishly abandoned. He had made enemies before — an essay called “Tiny Mummies!,” back in 1965, appalled stalwarts at The New Yorker — and his bumptious, commercially successful move toward fiction renewed his foes’ animus and increased their ranks. I remember John Updike flashing me a relieved smile the night Wolfe’s second novel lost the National Book Award in 1998; two years later Wolfe numbered Updike one of the “Three Stooges” who had failed to appreciate him. It’s hard to have a biography without misbehavior; it’s almost impossible to have one without feuds.

The editor of this life story will be hoping people want to buy it. Fortunately, Wolfe has the kind of public branding and recognition (the white suits haven’t hurt) that one associates more with the oft-televised writers born in the mid-1920s, less than a decade before he was — Vidal, Capote, Mailer, Baldwin, Buckley; excellent biographical subjects all. Wolfe has fans: I can recall a Washington arts function some years ago at which a Supreme Court justice waited to greet the novelist almost as if he were a costumed superhero who’d arrived on the floor of Comic Con. Few writers have cemented phrases into the national lingo, but Wolfe has done that with several: “radical chic,” “pushing the envelope,” “social X-rays,” “masters of the universe.”

Any biography requires raw material, and archivally Wolfe seems to be a man in full. The New York Public Library has lately paid more than $2 million for a collection of the writer’s papers said to contain, along with notebooks and manuscripts, over 10,000 letters. The senders and recipients prove Wolfe a busy, connected creature, a figure in the sort of social tapestry he considers to be the novel’s real business.

I greet the announcement of new fiction by lower-key, ultimately greater artists — let’s say William Trevor or Alice Munro — with a different, if no less keen, sort of pleasure. But I feel no urgent desire for a biography of either one of them. They’ve earned their privacy through a kind of exquisite circumscription, the deep, career-long exploration of individual psychologies in remote precincts. Wolfe, by contrast, has looked for life above the fold and at high decibel levels — on the frantic trading floor, in clamorous courthouses, amid the roar of rockets and racecars. It makes sense for his own life to wind up as a chronicle with an index.

Thomas Mallon’s eight novels include “Henry and Clara,” “Bandbox,” “Fellow Travelers” and “Watergate,” a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also published nonfiction about plagiarism (“Stolen Words”), diaries (“A Book of One’s Own”), letters (“Yours Ever”) and the Kennedy assassination (“Mrs. Paine’s Garage”), as well as two books of essays. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications. A recipient of the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for distinguished prose style, he is currently professor of English at George Washington University.

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By Ayana Mathis

Albert Murray was a man of great accomplishments and not nearly the renown he ought to have had.

You may not have heard of Albert Murray. You might not own any of his 12 books or have sat in on any of his lectures at Columbia or Emory University. You may have entirely missed the life and work of an inimitable novelist, cultural critic, and jazz and blues scholar — I certainly did.

Albert Murray died at 97 on Aug. 18, 2013. He was a man of great accomplishments and not nearly the renown he ought to have had. Which isn’t to say he was obscure; the people who knew Murray loved him. They loved him so much that his memorial service was held at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which he helped found alongside Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch. Judith Jamison, the former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, was there, along with Crouch and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Not to mention the publishing luminaries Sonny Mehta and Erroll McDonald. And, in the jazz-funeral style Murray deserved, Marsalis ended the memorial by marching his band out of the auditorium playing “Didn’t He Ramble.”

Here is a crash course in Murray: He was the author of a memoir, four novels, several books about the blues that are at once scholarly and down-homey, and a few volumes of cultural criticism. Ah, yes, and a collection of poetry that includes a poem about William Faulkner I’d dare anyone to top. Ralph Ellison was a dear friend of his. The painter Romare Bearden was a friend, too. Murray and Bearden entered into an artistic collaboration that yielded Bearden’s series “The Block,” inspired by the view from Murray’s balcony in Harlem. Murray hung out with James Baldwin in Paris in the 1950s. He was the co-writer of Count Basie’s autobiography. The National Book Critics Circle gave him a lifetime achievement award in 1997. Duke Ellington called him “the unsquarest man I know.” During his college days, he spent a night at Ma Rainey’s house; in his memoir, “South to a Very Old Place,” he describes sleeping in her “red-velvet-draped, tenderloin-gothic, incense-sultry sickroom.”

Murray didn’t publish his first book until he was in his 50s, and then he spent the rest of his life making up for lost time. That first book, “The Omni-Americans,” argued for a wider conception of American identity that acknowledged the centrality and profundity of black culture. Murray maintained that America is so mingled as to be “a mulatto culture” (a startling reappropriation of the term). His ideas struck some as too integrationist and earned Murray more than a few enemies. But as Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out in “King of Cats,” his 1996 New Yorker profile of Murray, “in Murray’s hands, integration wasn’t an act of accommodation but an act of introjection.”

Visionary though he was, Murray wasn’t right about everything — and certainly his polemics against the likes of Richard Wright and James Baldwin rightfully stuck in more than a few craws — but his work reveals a nuanced and agile thinker, and his prose is transcendent. When it comes to the blues, Murray’s expertise is undeniable. With characteristic brio, his seminal “Stomping the Blues” explores that music as the African-American idiom through which the spirit, mood and variety of black experience finds expression.

I’ve saved my favorite for last: Murray’s first novel, “Train Whistle Guitar,” an autobiographical coming-of-age story set in his native Alabama. His style was heavily influenced by the language of the South and by the jazz and blues he loved. His sentences dive and soar, they vibrate with word play and hum with lyricism.

Murray had a phrase he used often in his work: “the also and the also.” He used this as shorthand for the relatedness of things, and the complexities — and challenges — in that relatedness. He used it to evoke the multivalence of cultural memory, of blues and jazz music and of American identity itself. Murray seems more relevant now than ever. If this isn’t a moment in which we could all benefit from an encounter with a little “also and also,” I don’t know what is.

Ayana Mathis is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the 2014-15 New York Public Library’s Cullman Center Fellowship. “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie,” her first novel, was a New York Times Bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, one of NPR’s Best Books of 2013 and was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Ayana taught Creative Writing at The Writer’s Foundry MFA Program at St. Joseph’s College, Brooklyn. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.