“The People’s Tycoon” is likely to become the standard biography of Henry Ford for some time to come. It is one of those sumptuous, traditional Knopf productions printed on heavy paper with untrimmed pages whose presentation announces its permanence and heft.

This is, in one sense, a well-researched book – if you consider research a matter of examining archives. Steven Watts was diligent, but he has also succumbed to the modern biographical malady that Leon Edel deplored: a surfeit of documentation.

For me, biography is something more than an affair with an archive. Ford died in 1947, which means there have to be people who worked for him or knew him in other contexts who are still alive. Then there is the Ford family, which is bound to have stories about the old man worth considering, if not for their factuality than for the lingering aura of the man.

Judging by his acknowledgments, Mr. Watts spoke with neither the family nor a single Ford friend or employee. This seems astounding to me, a biographer who craves a visceral contact with those who knew my subject as a living presence. Oral histories, documents of all kinds are wonderful resources, and Mr. Watts makes shrewd use of them. But there is nothing like a personal encounter with witnesses to a life.

Did the Ford family shut out Mr. Watts, or did he not bother to contact them? There is no way of telling from what he has to say about his research. Perhaps he feels about interviews the way Marianne Moore once told me she did: “They’re so messy.” Words on paper have a fixity but also an illusory authority. Writing it down does not make it any truer than just saying it. Following the paper trail is only one way for the biographer to interact with his subject.

I grew up in Detroit, where Henry Ford was an everyday presence in my life. I learned about him in school; many of my relatives worked in his auto plants. Shortly after immigrating to this country in 1911, my grandfather moved to Detroit because Henry Ford paid something like double the wage my grandfather could make in Pittsburgh’s steel plants. The Dodge brothers, Walter Chrysler, but most of all Henry Ford were what made America, as far as I was concerned.

Mr. Watts is keen to explain Ford’s legacy, so it is perplexing to me that he did not look for echoes of the man in Detroit and its environs. As Ford himself might have commanded, “Get out on the floor, Mr. Watts, and get your hands dirty!”

Then there is Mr. Watts’s astounding dismissal of virtually everything that was previously written about Henry Ford. His pitch for his own book takes my breath away:

Interpreters of Henry Ford’s career, both during his lifetime and since, have done little to solve the enigma of his promiscuous appeal. For decades, journalists and historians have examined him in many guises. They have left a trail of contradictory assessments and unanswered questions in their wake. Was Ford an admirable titan who created an industrial empire, or a repressive tyrant who crushed everyone in his path? Was he a business innovator who pioneered pathbreaking productive processes, or a greedy capitalist who degraded work for millions? Was he a social revolutionary seeking to uplift American workers, or a cynical paternalist using subtle new methods of social control? Was he a public figure with the common touch, or an embodiment of the people’s bad taste? Wildly divergent answers to these questions have never been reconciled, and Ford has been alternately denounced and deified since his emergence on the public stage in the early twentieth century. The genuine man remains elusive. The secret of his appeal and his significance continues to be largely unexplained.

This kind of hyperbole works well in book proposals. It is what publishers want to hear. But that a serious biographer could be so dismissive of all Fordiana and think that one book – his book – can resolve “wildly divergent” views is simplistic, not to say disingenuous. “The genuine man” is a particularly annoying phrase, implying that all other accounts of Ford have been factitious.

To the contrary, it is in the nature of a mythic figure like Ford that he will continue to be the subject of debate. By shilling for his book in such a shameless way, Mr. Watts does a disservice to history and to biography. I suppose he might point out that his notes do justice to previous work on Ford. Not really. They simply acknowledge sources, failing to provide any sense of the biographical tradition Mr. Watts is building on. Indeed, his book implies there is none.

Does “The People’s Tycoon” mark an advance over other biographies? It is hard to say without reviewing the voluminous literature about Ford. Certainly Mr. Watts writes well, and some of his formulations – such as Ford’s invention of the concept of “consumer self-fulfillment” are felicitous. Thinking about how people buy automobiles and other products as a way of enhancing the self – not merely displaying wealth or extracting enjoyment – refreshes our sense of what is unique about American materialism.

Mr. Watts’s book portrays Ford in a more capacious and sensitive framework than ever before. If only he had made this claim, instead of presenting his biography as appearing de nouveau. He would have established himself as a more credible authority.