Biographies often bog down because they are birth-to-death account books. Jazzing the genre helps: interrupting chronology, flashing forward and backward, changing tenses, creating diversions with dialogue and dramatic scenes, engaging in bold speculations, and – best of all – transforming the biographer into a bumbling yet curiously authoritative character.

James Boswell’s great achievement is playing the fool while, Columbo-like, ferreting out the truth. The first time Boswell meets Samuel Johnson, he describes himself as retreating from the field, struck down in the battle of words with the Great Cham.Even as shrewd a critic as Macaulay thought Boswell an idiot who functioned nevertheless as Johnson’s pitch-perfect amanuensis.

The discovery of the Boswell papers early in the last century put to rest this influential Macaulayan conceit. Boswell, in fact, labored to train his mind. He was a diligent researcher (far more persistent than Johnson himself), and his biography is hardly the naive composition that certain pre-20th-century readers discounted.

This is not to say that Larry L. King is anything like a fool. But Boswell’s spirit thrives in this rollicking life of Willie Morris, “In Search of Willie Morris” (Public Affairs, 254 pages, $26.95). Morris remade the historic but moribund Harper’s magazine into a culture beacon that featured the best nonfiction work of novelists such as William Styron and Norman Mailer, not to mention the superb journalism of David Halberstam and Mr. King himself, among others.

Morris, a Southerner steeped in the tradition of William Faulkner – what Flannery O’Connor called the “Dixie Express” – took New York City by storm for a brief, intense period in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Named editor of Harper’s at the age of 32, he made himself and the magazine a cynosure of the literary-political world. Morris, no mean writer himself (his memoir “North Toward Home” [1967] is an American classic), never fully recovered from his heady New York days, which he described in his 1993 memoir of that name. The Cowles family, owners of the magazine, disliked anti-establishment writers like Mr. Mailer, and they disliked Morris’s high-handedness. Mr. King recounts having told Morris that, however highly regarded Morris might be outside the magazine, he was still a “hired hand.”

Morris went to pieces after his breakup with Harper’s, never really recovering until the last decade of his life, when he produced several fine books – many of them written in the memoir mode he mastered so well. All along, Mr. King, like many of Morris’s other friends, tried to prop Morris up, providing him with money, lodging, and jobs. But what really saved Morris in the end was returning to his native Mississippi, where he married a woman who not only could respond with flair to his writing but who patiently domesticated the notoriously wild Willie into the routines of a stable life.

Mr. King not only provides the perspective of a friend but also a perspective on the limitations of friendship. He thought he was Morris’s best friend.Doing the biography disabused him when he discovered many others with similar claims. The friend Mr. King knew so well had a hundred other confidants. Did Mr. King feel deceived by slick Willie? Hardly. Instead he shows why friendship – or any other form of intimacy – is no substitute for biography.

When Mr. King’s account of Morris’s first marriage did not square with that of Morris’s ex-wife, Celia, she sent her rebuke to the biographer, who quotes from her letter. The sources talk back, making this biography thrive on friction, which includes a bout between the biographer and his subject. It is not every biographer who has had the opportunity to knock his subject down. And it is not every biographer who beds one of his subject’s lovers (this is the reason, in fact, why Mr. King and Morris came to blows). Biography is, indeed, a contact sport. Show me the biographer who has not been abraded by his subject. Bowing out of the affair with Morris’s ex-lover, partly out of respect for Morris’s hurt feelings, Mr. King was eventually able to repair the two-year breach in their friendship.

Larry King did not set out to become Willie Morris’s Boswell. The biography came about after Mr. King wrote an article about the late Morris and realized that reminiscence and friendship came nowhere near puzzling out the mystery of Willie Morris. The central question for Mr. King, and for any biography of Morris, is: Why did Morris suffer such a complete collapse after his departure from Harper’s? Morris had many lucrative offers: editorships, writing assignments, well-paid lectures, and so on.

Mr. King has no definitive answer, but his afterword canvasses the possibilities. Morris felt wounded and bereft, the biographer supposes. My own view is that success came early and Morris, who had writing ambitions not yet fulfilled, suffered a crisis of confidence. In effect, acclaim for editing Harper’s had put off the day of reckoning when Morris would have to find his way as a writer.

Mr. King suggests yet another reason, which has nothing to do with thwarted ambition, moral failings, or character flaws: Morris may well have been “subject to clinical depression from a young age.” This diagnosis certainly explains a good deal: Morris’s alcoholism, his hiding from people, and his inability to manage the everyday responsibilities of an adult. Mr. King rightly draws on William Styron’s contemporary classic, “Darkness Visible,” a harrowing but therapeutic account of his own clinical depression, which made him suicidal. This kind of depression can strike anyone, including high achievers.

Given the wreck of Morris’s life, it is remarkable how he evidently learned to cope with depression and provide himself with a final decade of superb writing in “Homecomings” (1989), “Faulkner’s Mississippi” (1990), “New York Days” (1993), “My Dog Skip” (1995),” and other books and essays. His novel, “Taps” – in some ways his summa – was published posthumously in 2001.

Like Boswell, Mr. King has a genial way of integrating research and results, so that the biographical process itself, and the person of the biographer, become one. This is a rare achievement in the history of biography that should set up Mr. King for one or more literary awards.

crollyson@nysun.com