When The New York Sun asked me to review Fred Goodman’s book “The Secret City: Woodlawn Cemetery and the Buried History of New York,” I presumed that the book was about, well, Woodlawn Cemetery. I thought that Ed Bergman’s book “Woodlawn Remembers” was all anyone needed on that admittedly great cemetery.

Then I read the book. The title doesn’t do justice to a book that is about more than Woodlawn. Mr. Goodman’s is one of the best new books I’ve read all year. It’s great New Yorkiana. And it contains within it the seed of a new genre of writing about the city. Some years ago, the historian John Lukacs prophesied the rise of a new mode of historical writing, what he called “auto-history,” a blending (to put it crudely) of autobiography and history. Fred Goodman has written an outstanding work of auto-history.

An award-winning journalist, Mr. Goodman, who lives with his family in White Plains, had begun to feel his middle-age pangs of mortality. He reformed his ways and took up bicycling, which he had not done since he was a child. Once started, he became an obsessive cyclist, riding all about the city.

Then came September 11. Mr. Goodman, unable to sleep, cycled through New York in the wee small hours. His rides became ones of discovery of, as the title puts it, New York’s buried history.

It starts when he happens upon two memorials to John Purroy Mitchel. Goodman, not heretofore a student of the city’s history, had never heard of Mitchel. Yet the memorials told Mr. Goodman that Mitchel had been mayor of New York, and someone who died serving in the military. Mitchel was obviously, not so long ago, a titanic figure on the city scene. How could he be so utterly forgotten?

Mr. Goodman felt a post-9/11 moral imperative to exhume (figuratively) Mitchel. As smoke rose from the ruins of lower Manhattan, Mr. Goodman visited the Municipal Archives to learn what he could about Mitchel. He learned that Mitchel was a remarkable man whose steely disregard for business as usual first got him elected as a reforming may or, then lost him any chance of reelection. No sooner was he out of office than he began serving in the army, honoring his deep conviction that the U.S. belonged in World War I. He died in an aviation training exercise.

Though memorialized in the city’s streets, New Yorkers, who fail to ponder memorials, had ceased to care about John Purroy Mitchel. That’s where Woodlawn comes in. Mr. Goodman learned that Mitchel was interred in the great cemetery in the northern Bronx. Goodman knew of the cemetery. He saw it every day from the MetroNorth train he rode into the city. He also knew that his literary idol, Herman Melville, was buried in Woodlawn, and, since Mr. Goodman was a music writer, he knew that Woodlawn contained Duke Ellington’s final resting place. Thus, he set out for Woodlawn.

Woodlawn is an amazingly beautiful 400-acre cemetery. It’s neither as large nor as old as Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, which unlike Woodlawn belongs with Cambridge’s Mount Auburn and Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill among the first generation of great cemeteries in America, vast pastoral settings that before there were major public parks served as places for picnickers, promenaders, and lovers.

Opened in 1863, Woodlawn, in short order, succeeded Green-Wood as the preferred burial ground of the city’s elites. So it is that among the 300,000 bodies buried at Woodlawn we find many famous names – Melville and Ellington, Miles Davis and Fiorello La Guardia.

Mr. Goodman finds Melville’s grave and ponders it. But his attention soon turns to the improbably grandiose mausoleums, as ornate as any civic buildings. These mausoleums’ inhabitants are mostly people he has never heard of. One such person is Austin Corbin. Mr. Goodman seeks to learn more. From Corbin’s New York Times front-page obituary in 1906, Mr. Goodman learns that Corbin was the father of modern Long Island. Seeking more, Mr. Goodman goes to Jamaica, to the main branch of the Queens Borough Public Library, to consult Vincent Seyfried’s monumental history of the Long Island Railroad, which Corbin owned.

A dedicated fan of Whitman (not buried at Woodlawn), Mr. Goodman becomes fascinated by Woodlawn interree Orson Fowler, a prominent 19th-century phrenologist who was Whitman’s friend and publisher of the second edition of “Leaves of Grass.” So does Goodman track down others: sculptor Attilio Piccirilli, writer Finley Peter Dunne, poet Countee Cullen, politician Vito Marcantonio, aviatrix Ruth Nichols, and others.

Mr. Goodman doesn’t just profile these figures. That would offer nothing more than a guide to Woodlawn. He does two things, rather. First, he often tells us of his own process of research – the visits to archives and libraries. He takes us on a guided tour of his own process of learning. Second, Mr. Goodman composes fictive vignettes about and in the voices of his subjects. In other words, he makes stuff up about them.

Often I dislike that sort of thing. I prefer historical novels with characters based on real people, but in which the author has the tact not to call them by their real names – for example, Edith Wharton’s transformation of August Belmont into Julius Beaufort, or Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood standing in for Charles Yerkes. This contrasts with, say, Gore Vidal, who has no compunction about putting his own words into Abraham Lincoln’s mouth (or putting Lincoln’s hand on a servant girl’s bottom). But there is nothing Vidalian in Mr. Goodman’s vignettes, which are drawn from his own sympathetic efforts to imagine these people whose stories he has exhumed. Some of these vignettes – the one about Piccirilli above all – deeply moved me.

By a variety of means – memoiristic tales of nocturnal bike rides, accounts of trips to archives, straight recountings of his subjects’ lives, and fictive vignettes – Mr. Goodman presents the story-the auto-history – of his self-discovery, his recognition of himself as a historical creature, inevitably to become part of “the buried history of New York.”