The perennial problem for biographers of literary figures is that they are, generally speaking, no match for their subjects. Unless the biographer is himself a notable stylist, it is best to avoid literary flourishes. Otherwise, the biographer is apt to embarrass himself in an effort to impress or entertain. Better for the biographer to concentrate on his powers of selection, narrative management, and pace.

The best biographies rarely sparkle sentence by sentence, but they can excel through deft handling of detail. If a biography has the right architecture, its interior decoration should take care of itself. In other words, biography is a neoclassical genre that rarely tolerates the romantic and the rococo. Similes and metaphors – so abundant in poetry and fiction – are distracting when used with frequency in biography.

Henry Roth is an especially difficult assignment. How to write the life of a man who spent much of his life in a depressive state?

Roth’s masterpiece, “Call It Sleep” (1934), was heralded by our finest critics (Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, for example) as the greatest novel of the immigrant experience; its use of language was deemed a worthy rival to James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Yet Roth lapsed into virtual silence soon after, despairing of equaling, let alone surpassing, his first novel.

Praised but quickly forgotten after it first appeared, “Call It Sleep” was rediscovered 30 years later with a fervor unmatched since the resurrection of Herman Melville in the 1920s.Then, 60 years after his debut, Roth began publishing a series of novels under the umbrella title “Mercy of a Rude Stream,” two of which Philip Roth (no relation) thought masterpieces.

On the one hand, the Roth revival is a stirring tale. On the other, what is a biographer to do with the 60-year interval between books? Roth did not forsake literature for a life of adventure. On the contrary, he skulked off to rural Maine and plucked, eviscerated, and marketed waterfowl for a living – when he was not tutoring students in math or working as an attendant in a mental hospital, where he himself thought he might belong.

Steven Kellman’s biography, “Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth” (Norton, 384 pages, $25.95), reminds me a good deal of Blake Bailey’s biography of Richard Yates, another world-class depressive. If Mr. Kellman does not quite equal Mr. Bailey’s literary effort, it is because he begins in too jaunty a fashion, apparently unwilling to get out of the way and let this story of magnificent pain and redemption tell itself. This is especially true of the section about Roth’s father, Herman, who failed at nearly every employment he essayed. “Sweet may be the uses of adversity, but adversity further soured Herman Roth,” writes Mr. Kellman, in a sentence that ends with a cliche about the father “choking on his pride.” Later, when Henry becomes a Communist Party member and goes by the name of Berry, Mr. Kellman cannot refrain from adding, “Disillusioned with the Party, Berry would finally sour more than thirty years after joining.” This sophomoric cuteness, fortunately, subsides in the last two-thirds of the book, which are as harrowing and exhilarating as any I have ever read in a biography.

So what happened to Henry Roth? And what happened to his biographer? Roth, it turns out, never quite stopped writing. But he could not produce another book because … well, he gave many reasons. His devotion to communism pushed him to turn his back on a first novel he deemed too subjective: Focusing on the consciousness of a young boy (David Schearl is only 8 when the novel ends) and on the depressing conditions of his Lower East Side life did nothing to advance the cause of the proletariat. Roth’s own alienation from his Jewish background made it impossible for him to write about what he knew best; when he tried to write about a Midwestern, working-class hero, his prose became inauthentic.

But the real reason for Roth’s writer’s block, which he disclosed in the 1990s as he began to publish the six-decade-delayed sequel to “Call It Sleep,” was his shame over having committed incest with his sister and with his cousin. To continue the story of “Call It Sleep” would be to write an autobiographical novel that would show Roth himself to be a despicable person – or so Roth believed.

“Call It Sleep” had sold only a few thousand copies before Irving Howe reviewed the Avon paperback on the front cover of the New York Times in 1964. Even then, Roth doubted that the world cared, and it took decades more (while “Call It Sleep” went through 30 printings and sales of more than 1 million) to convince him he would have to confront his shame and overcome his writer’s block. (Well, not quite a writer’s block since over the years Roth kept writing fiction – the New Yorker printed a few stories and rejected over a dozen – even as he insisted his life as an artist was over.)

One of the events that brought the literary Henry Roth back to life was the Six Day War, which changed his view of what it meant to be a Jew. He not only repudiated his universalist communism, which did not tolerate any pride in ethnicity, he became a Zionist, believing that Israel’s victory had redeemed the image of Jews as victims. Roth seems to have regarded his later fiction in the same light: Only by writing the book-length sequels to “Call It Sleep” and frankly exposing his shame could he redeem himself as a man and a writer.

Mr. Kellman’s biography thus becomes a story of incredible courage and tenacity: A tormented man surmounts his own worst fears by writing about them. This story is so powerful that Mr. Kellman wisely subdues his rhetoric, favoring a biographer’s plain style and attention to the telling detail. The result is one of the essential biographies of our era.