The more we know about George Balanchine, who made more good ballets than anyone else, the better.

There are two big biographies, Bernard Taper’s being the best, and good books by his dancers about him, beginning with Tamara Geva’s memoirs and Merrill Ashley’s. But just as Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Mozart are continually being written about, discovered, and re-appraised, Balanchine is the natural focus for those who discover ballet by seeing his work.

Now Robert Gottlieb, who first saw Balanchine ballets when he was in high school in 1948, and Terry Teachout, who discovered Balanchine in 1987, have written blessedly brief biographies to help newcomers comprehend a special art and a rare individual.

Choreography, the art of making dances, is the rarest gift in the arts. We can all name 10 painters, 10 composers, and 10 writers who are important to history and to us, but choreographers throughout history have been as rare as hen’s teeth. Try to name five.

To be a choreographer, Balanchine told me years ago, you have first to be a good dancer, a really good dancer. Most really good dancers want to be great dancers, and they concentrate on that with seldom a thought about what it would be like to move other dancers.

But young Balanchine, who loved women, wanted them to be more beautiful than ever. So at 15 he began to make them look that way in new ballets. He made men more heroic than ever, too. The rest is dance history.

Both Mr. Gottlieb’s “The Ballet Maker” (HarperCollins, 224 pages, $27.95) and Mr. Teachout’s “All in the Dances” (Harcourt, 208 pages, $22) succinctly relate the highlights of the Balanchine saga, from making ballets in old Russia and the U.S.S.R., when the establishment was against him, to his triumphs under the impresario Diaghilev in Europe and on his complete conquest of the art in the United States.

Ballet blossomed in this country through the initiative and largesse of Lincoln Kirstein, who joined Balan chine in founding the School of American Ballet and ensembles that became the New York City Ballet and other ballet companies that spun off from coast to coast.

Now the sun never sets on Balanchine. In 2003, 209 ensembles round the world were dancing his ballets, the Balanchine Trust tells me. A ballet company in Zimbabwe is now preparing his ballet “Serenade,” the most popular of his ballets round the world.

How did all this come about, what made him tick? Messrs. Gottlieb and Teachout have taken time in this, Balanchine’s centennial year, to give us their perspectives. But both are concerned not only with the man but his ballets: how they came to be, and how the newcomer can grasp them.

Mr. Gottlieb, editor-in-chief at Alfred A. Knopf for many years, former editor of the New Yorker, dance critic of the New York Observer, and still one of the busiest editors in the world, knew Balanchine and Kirstein personally. A member of the board of the New York City Ballet, he worked with them on programming, promotion, and sales. This gives Mr. Gottlieb, with his knowledge of Balanchine’s character and temperament, an advantage.

Mr. Teachout, on the other hand, was more of a newcomer. A musician, music critic of Commentary magazine, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, and a new member of the National Council on the Arts, he went as a stranger to the New York City Ballet in 1987.

The houselights went down and the curtain flew up, revealing eight young women dressed in simple white ballet skirts, standing in front of a blue black drop. The scrappy little band in the pit slouched to attention, the conductor gave the downbeat, and the women started to move, now in time to Bach’s driving beat, now against its grain. As the solo violinists made their separate entrances, two more women came running out from the wings and began to dance at center stage. Their steps were crisp, precise almost jazzy. For a moment I was confused. The stage was bare, and the dancers’ unadorned costumes offered no clue as to who they were or what they were doing, though I could tell they weren’t “acting,” not in any conventional sense. They made no obviously theatrical gestures, exchanged no significant glances, yet I felt sure they were telling some kind of a story. Was I missing the point? All at once I understood: the MUSIC was the story. The dancers were mirroring its complex events, not in a sing-songy, naively imitative way but with sophistication and grace. This was no dumb show, no mere pantomime, but sound made visible, written in the air like fireworks glittering in the night sky. When it was over, eighteen breathless minutes later, the audience broke into friendly but routine applause, seemingly unaware that it had witnessed a miracle. Rooted in my seat, eyes wide with astonishment, I asked myself, Why hasn’t anybody ever told me about this? And what kind of a man made it?

In their histories, neither Mr. Teachout or Mr. Gottlieb it seems to me, gives sufficient acknowledgment to Betty Cage, general manager of the New York City Ballet for many years, who held it all together. She it was who made the Balanchine-Kirstein partnership work, whose calm deliberation quieted all the storms, so that Balanchine could make one ballet after another.

As for the Balanchine mystery, what really made him so great an artist, there are no new answers in this book. The critics Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce in their books have come close to that, as both Messrs. Gottlieb and Teachout acknowledge. But it is the heart of that mystery that we all keep seeking, as we do with Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Mozart, when we go back to the ballet wanting more, more!

Mr. Mason, editor of the quarterly magazine Ballet Review and dance critic for WQXR, wrote with Balanchine three editions of “Balanchine’s Stories of the Great Ballets” and edited “I Remember Balanchine,” (Anchor) recollections of the balletmaster by those who knew him.