In “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 (1988), the first of three epic volumes, Taylor Branch observed that the “chosen structure” of his work is “narrative biographical history.” This story of a man and a movement is, “strictly speaking,” Mr. Branch emphasizes, “not a biography of Martin Luther King Jr.” Rather, Mr. Branch has “tried to make biography and history reinforce each other by knitting together a number of personal stories along the main seam of an American epoch.” Narrative is the operative word here: Mr. Branch’s prose is not analytical. What interpretation inheres in his trilogy results, as in the drama, from his desire to “let the characters define each other.”

Mr. Branch’s trilogy has been compared to Shelby Foote’s “Civil War” volumes and to Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln,” and though the sweep of Mr. Branch’s narrative certainly rivals its illustrious predecessors, it is unlikely to create the kind of myth that makes of Lincoln a Sandburg poem or of Lincoln’s assassination a drama all the more memorable because of Foote’s extraordinary evocation of the scene of death. Scrupulously documented, Mr. Branch’s work will outlast Sandburg’s or Foote’s books as history, but theirs surpass his as literature. The telling point is that Mr. Branch concludes “At Canaan’s Edge” with a shocking abruptness that works as history but fails to follow his own literary logic of letting the characters “define each other.”

As history, the trilogy begins with a sketch of Reconstruction, quickly narrowing to focus on W.E.B. Dubois’s declaration at the turn of the 20th century that the “preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil.” Preachers “considered themselves called by God to the role of Moses, a combination of ruler and prophet.” History, in other words, becomes the vehicle by which Mr. Branch shows how Martin Luther King Jr. became both the expression and the leader of a movement.

King cannot be fathomed, Mr. Branch implies, without understanding what happened to Vernon Johns, King’s charismatic predecessor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Johns was the grandson of a slave who had been hanged for “cutting his master in two with a scythe.” Johns’s mother had a white father identified only as Price, who had killed another white man for attempting to rape Price’s slave mistress. Even more startling and confounding, when Price’s

Negro wife died in the 1870s, he took all his Negro children into the other household to be raised by his childless white wife, “Miss Kitty.” Vernon Johns’s mother, Sallie Price, made this transfer as a little girl, and years later she told her family how the taboos had been respected against all opposing reality, even in the intimacy of the home. She never called her father “father,” for decency required the Negro children to be orphans and the white couple to be missionary dispensers of foster care. When Price died about 1900, Sallie Price Johns went to the funeral with her young son Vernon and her husband Willie, son of the hanged slave, and sat through the burial services in a separate-but-equal family section, just across the gravesite from Miss Kitty and the white relatives.

We are in the world of William Faulkner, who titled novels “Absalom, Absalom!” and “Go Down, Moses,” when

Sallie Johns married her dead husband’s younger brother. So Vernon Johns finished his youth as the stepson of his uncle, and the grandson of a slave who killed his master and of a master who killed for his slave. Only in the Bible did he find open discussion of such a tangle of sex, family, slavery, and violence.

The segregation King decried was not merely a social injustice; it was an affront to humanity itself.

Mr. Branch’s subsequent volumes, including his newest and last, “At Canaan’s Edge” (Simon & Schuster, 1,056, $35) never quite match the biblical aura of “Parting the Waters.” They deal not as much with family and community lore – as Faulkner does in his incomparable fiction – but in FBI transcripts of bugged conversations and data drawn from interviewees who are speaking for the historical record.

Just as King is measured against the flamboyant and controversial Vernon Johns in “Parting the Waters,” King is twinned with Johnson in “At Canaan’s Edge.” In 1968, Johnson despaired as he saw support for the Vietnam War waning not only in public opinion polls but in the counsels of “the wise men,” old foreign-policy hands like Dean Acheson, who hectored the president and his generals about their unwillingness to seek a military solution: “Then what in the name of God are five hundred thousand men out there doing? Chasing girls?” Johnson’s hold on events steadily weakened as he eyed rivals like Robert Kennedy, who were poised to supplant him. “I will go down the drain,” he moaned.

Similarly, King, who became the symbol of a movement after the Montgomery bus boycott, had seen his own prestige plummet as he took his controversial stand against the Vietnam War and saw his pre-eminence challenged by Black Power advocates such as Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X. He was feuding with his stalwarts, Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson (the latter, King suspected, aiming to lead his own movement).

Both Johnson and King were exhausted. King would sometimes collapse in “incoherent fatigue” and despair – especially when his protests on behalf of the Memphis garbage workers turned violent, provoking the nation’s editorialists to question King’s leadership and his power to keep his movement peaceful. King was thinking of calling off his march on Washington as he watched television in his Memphis hotel room: “He sank beneath the bedcovers in his underwear, transfixed by the news, smoking cigarettes.” He was so demoralized he even said aloud, “Maybe we just have to admit that the day of violence is here. … And maybe we just have to give up and let violence take its course.”

This is biography at its best – in the tent with Brutus, where, Montaigne avowed, biography belongs. The historical King appears in the next few days, with “resilient bravado,” giving public speeches that show no sign of the private man’s anxieties.

Nowhere does Mr. Branch draw the direct parallel between King and Johnson, as Plutarch would. He provides the briefest links when he observes: “President Johnson also set his course in storms of colliding emotion.” His own daughter chastises him for sending her husband to war. Alternately belligerent with his staff and uncharacteristically subdued, Johnson seeks a way out of the war, deciding ultimately not to run again for the presidency.

Unfortunately, this riveting drama of parallel lives cannot come to a resolution because history is not that Shakespearian. Johnson departs the historical stage a depleted man, and King, standing on his Memphis balcony, “stood still for once, and his sojourn on earth went blank.”

There is very little scene setting for King’s last moments, and no dramatic denouement of the kind to be found in Sandburg, Foote, or in the greatest of all narrative biographical histories, Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.” We do not see the bullet-torn body, the ensuing chaos, the moments a Shakespeare would be able to stage. It can be argued that Mr. Branch’s abrupt ending is truer to history than the work of his baroque predecessors. Very true. But if history is served, literature, and more specifically, biography, is shirked.

crollyson@nysun.com