Stephen Crane was never afraid of historical fiction. “I have spent ten nights writing a story of the war on my own responsibility but I am not sure that my facts are real and the books won’t tell me what I want to know so I must do it all over again, I guess.” Although he had never seen battle — he was not born until 1871 — Crane had just written our great novel of the Civil War, “The Red Badge of Courage,” a classic that is too often wasted on the young.

Now Edmund White, a highly respected novelist and biographer who has recently turned to historical fiction, has published “Hotel de Dream” (Ecco, 228 pages, $23.95), a novel about Stephen Crane. It is a decent, if not essential, contribution to the genre of biopic novels, in which one novelist imagines the life of another.

Some readers complain — isn’t there something limited about such books? Shouldn’t the novelist find a subject beyond his own favorite writers? Taking liberties with the wife of Anthony Trollope, as Mr. White did in “Fanny” (2003) may be a lot of fun. But how does an author confront the intimidating style of his predecessor? In 2004, both Colm Tóibín and David Lodge published novels that starred Henry James, and only Tóibín came close to surviving the inevitable comparison with the master.

In “Hotel de Dream,” Mr. White takes on a narrow and well-documented episode in Crane’s life — his last sickness. Mr. White can provide dialogue taken from the historical record. “It isn’t bad,” Crane famously said of his deathbed. “You feel sleepy. … Just a little dreamy anxiety [about] which world you’re really in.”

The real test of Mr. White’s imagination comes with the long story-within-a-story that he has Crane dictate to his wife, Cora. Mr. White makes no attempt to mimic Crane’s style, which seems wise. Crane was a wild writer. He could write of a seascape that “[t]hese waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small boat navigation.” His personifications, neologisms, and exaggerations would not sit well in a contemporary mouth. Mr. White chooses a nearly invisible, but astute style: “He sat on a wood bench polished smooth by human contact, the wood arm-rest dark from the acids in human hands.”

In “Hotel de Dream,” Mr. White is not primarily interested in style; he is interested in homosexuality. Homosexuality was also the interest in Mr. Tóibín’s “The Master”; it motivates David Leavitt’s new book about the mathematician G. H. Hardy, “The Indian Clerk,” as well as Tom Stoppard’s 1997 play about A.E. Housman, “The Invention of Love.”

The point of all of these reimaginings is to restore what was suppressed. An artist who was secretly gay produced a body of work that was deeply inflected by the one fact the artist couldn’t express. Mr. Tóibín has a scene in which James tries to write about an abortive assignation — but there is a point beyond which James cannot let himself imagine. Later, Mr. Tóibín writes that James lived “as if his life belonged to someone else, a story that had not yet been written, a character who had not been fully imagined.” Thus, fiction can hint at something profound about James’s allegiance to fiction. Such material cannot be surmised, responsibly, in a biography. This goes a long way to justify such novels about novelists.

But Stephen Crane was not gay. Mr. White imagines, however, that Crane might have written and then burned a story about a male prostitute. There is only iffy evidence that Crane did so, and Mr. White admits in an afterword that he doubts it. The story, supposedly called “Flowers of Asphalt,” would at least have complemented Crane’s incendiary novella “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” which, as a chronicle of squalor, remains a revelation. A story about a boy prostitute would not have been beyond Crane’s sympathies.

Yet that story within a story, as written by Mr. White, has the sepia tang of much current fiction about the old, grotesque New York. It is relatively restrained, but it leaves the reader eager to get to the less belabored parts of Mr. White’s novel, the scenes between Crane and Cora. Mr. White is excellent at describing illness — he details how Crane, subject to a daily sponge bath, hates to be washed piecemeal rather than all at once as in a bath. Cora frets that she will be blamed for her husband’s death, even as she gloats that his legacy will outlive those of James and Conrad. Meanwhile, Crane recalls all the loves of Crane’s life. But Mr. White makes of these misapprehensions a skillful, loving relationship. Mr. White calls “Hotel de Dream” “my fantasia on real themes provided by history.” Crane himself was not interested in the themes of history so much as history’s rudimentary pressures — battle was battle. Yet Mr. White does not deserve the full measure of skepticism that usually greets historical fiction. He has gone back into time for a discreet, stated reason: to imagine how a straight man would write about homosexuality in 1900. The best part of this book, however, is the gay author’s take on a straight couple.