“This book is a critical biography,” Richard Schickel announces in his author’s note to “Elia Kazan: A Biography” (HarperCollins, 544 pages, $29.95). The emphasis, in other words, is on Elia Kazan’s “singular career (no one has ever been such a dominant directorial force simultaneously in film and theater).” Kazan’s credits include his landmark stage productions of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Death of a Salesman” – not to mention his later screen work with icons such as Marlon Brando and James Dean.

Mr. Schickel does not delve into the intimacies and nuances of his subject’s private life and claims to offer “no more insight into Elia Kazan’s personal life than he himself offered in his own autobiography.” My heart sank on reading this disclaimer. Surely it is the purpose of biography to go beyond autobiography. But Mr. Schickel turned out to be too modest.True, he does not go into much detail about, say, Kazan’s many lovers, but the intense and amorous director is recognizable on every page of this biography. Mr. Schickel has, after all, provided “matters of context – of historical, critical, and, yes, political positioning – that he [Mr. Kazan] did not address in his own writings and conversations.”

Theater and film buffs – not to mention scholars – will revel in this astute explication of a working life. Mr. Schickel not only had access to Kazan, producing a short documentary about him for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but also to the director’s invaluable production notes, so that the inner processes of his theater and film construction are on view for the first time.

What is just as extraordinary is Mr. Schickel’s presentation of American political thought as it filtered through the artistic and commercial environs of Kazan’s world. Mr. Schickel begins with a prologue, “We All Make Mistakes,” that explains the controversy that has enveloped Kazan from the moment he “named names” and exposed the Hollywood Stalinists, whose simplistic version of McCarthyism and the blacklist continues to infect films such as the much touted recent “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

Mr. Schickel recounts the evening of January 7, 1999, when the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences assembled to choose recipients for various honorary awards. Karl Malden nominated his friend Elia Kazan, then 89, for the lifetime achievement award. Mr. Malden was prepared for trouble, since Kazan had been denounced as an informer whose testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities had ruined the careers of numerous writers, directors, and actors who were blacklisted on his say-so. In fact, as Mr. Schickel points out, Kazan named just a handful of people, but over the years legend magnified the ramifications of his friendly witness testimony. Mr. Malden won the day by arguing that the award should be based strictly on the undisputed merit of Kazan’s work.

The trouble for Kazan began after the Academy decided to honor him. Then the campaign against the snitch director became exactly the kind of smear that out-McCarthyed Joe McCarthy. In a paragraph, Mr. Schickel lays waste to Kazan’s persecutors. The terms of Kazan’s denunciation:

were almost entirely set by the aged remnants of Stalinism, by their younger allies from the New Left and by good hearted, liberal-minded show folks who had no understanding of the left-sectarian battles that had long ago shaped the politics of their trade.They simply identified with the Stalinists as innocent liberals not unlike themselves and had neither the experience nor the capacity to recognize, in the campaign that developed against Kazan, a typical Stalinist tactic – seize the high, easy-to-understand moral ground, then try to crush nuanced opposition to that position through sloganeering.

Stalinism prevails as an ideology so long as it is not recognized that informing is not, in itself, an evil. Would informing on fascists resonate the same way with Stalinists? Kazan had left the Communist Party 17 years before his HUAC testimony. Was he really supposed to be loyal to an organization he considered undemocratic and subversive, a bullying group that demanded slavish adherence to the party line and took its cues from Moscow? The Stalinist mentality, as Mr. Schickel observes, imputes to its opponents “motives that are never as highly principled as their own.”

Kazan regarded his HUAC testimony as a tragedy. Mr. Schickel honors historian Allen Weinstein for calling his attention to a passage from Kazan’s autobiography:

I thought what a terrible thing I had done; not the political aspect of it, because maybe that was correct; but it didn’t matter now, correct or not; all that mattered was the human side of the thing … I felt no political cause was worth hurting any other human for. What good deeds were stimulated by what I’d done? What villains exposed? How is the world better for what I did? It had just been a game of power and influence, and I’d been taken in and twisted from my true self.

This passage demonstrates why Elia Kazan will remain as one of the towering creative influences in American theater and film long after his Stalinist critics will have subsided into, at best, footnotes to history.

crollyson@nysun.com