Before the East End of Long Island became the “Hamptons” and a playground for the advocates of conspicuous consumption, it was a mecca for artists. At the turn of the century, painters like Thomas Moran, William Merritt Chase, and Childe Hassam found a feast in the understated beauty of the landscape, the sea-rinsed air, and the magical light.A second wave of artists – Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Fairfield Porter among them – arrived in the 1940s, and following them came the scores of writers and artists who were friends and colleagues.

In his new book, “De Kooning’s Bicycle” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 213 pages, $25), the art critic and poet Robert Long celebrates some of this second group in an unorthodox way. In addition to Pollock, de Kooning, and Porter, Mr. Long considers Alfonso Ossorio and Saul Steinberg and the writers Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and Jean Stafford.

In “De Kooning’s Bicycle” Mr. Long plays fast and loose with objectivity and avoids the straight narrative. He moves quickly from fact to fiction, making imagined entry into the minds of Pollock, de Kooning, and Ms. Stafford and allowing us into their streams of consciousness. We even accompany a revenant Pollock into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and become auditors of his interior monologue (“So this was what it was like, being dead”), a stream of post-consciousness. It is the literary equivalent of a docudrama – “based on a true story.”Those who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

Despite this, the book is an entertaining glimpse of three of the great icons of 20th-century art, and I have little quarrel with Mr. Long’s choice of them as representatives of the Hamptons. Including Steinberg, though, seems a bit of an afterthought. There are scores of significant East End artists and writers absent from his narrative. Considering only the dead, where are Larry Rivers and Roy Lichtenstein? Where are James Fenimore Cooper, Kenneth Koch, John Steinbeck, even Truman Capote? Though Mr. Long’s portrait of Ms. Stafford is touching, she seems another odd choice since she wrote little, if any, fiction once she moved to East Hampton. She didn’t know Pollock, though she lived near him. Nor did she know Porter or O’Hara. One looks in vain for a link between the last, sad days of an underappreciated novelist and the narrative of the Hamptons’s importance to the art world.

Mr. Long begins his book by straightforwardly chronicling the arrival of Moran, Chase, and Hassam. Chase actually founded a school in Southampton, the Shinnecock School of Art, conducting classes in plein-air painting, while he created his immortal landscapes of Shinnecock Hills. These are discrete chapters, and the author skips forward to Abstract Expressionism.

Pollock was brought to the East End by his wife, Lee Krasner,who hoped the seclusion would keep him from drinking. When he was sober, Pollock had an intense, if unspoken, connection with nature. The painter Hans Hofmann told him to use nature as a model; Pollock replied,”I am nature.”Pollock,one of the least articulate of speakers, never felt the need to explain himself to anyone. Mr. Long almost, but not quite, convinces me that he has become his silver tongue. He writes like the poet he is, and describes Pollock’s methods with a gripping immediacy. Paint is whipped onto the canvas with an onomatopoeic “prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt”:

He liked keeping the colors toned down, so when he added something bright, some green enamel, say, or red, it was as if the painting were grabbing you by the lapels. The earth tones kept everything grounded, like a bass line in a song. So when he unleashed screaming ribbons of cadmium yellow, it was like a hot trumpet solo. It was thrilling.

Porter, the lone representational painter in the book, is re-imagined through the fictitious eyes of Schuyler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who lived with the Porter family in their Southampton house for nearly 11 years. Yet the mentally troubled Schuyler, who was financially and emotionally dependent on the Porters, offered a far more vividly immediate and fascinating glimpse of their life together in his journals and letters – both of which are in print, as is a selection of his own art criticism.

The bicycle of the title is the one de Kooning rode every day from his house to his studio, or down to Accabonac Harbor to soak up the afternoon light that permeates so many of his paintings. In his sketch of O’Hara, Mr. Long has O’Hara muse about the bicycle: “It occurred to him that the bicycle itself must be part of Bill’s M.O.,” providing “glimpses of the world that fueled his work.” Of course, we don’t really know if it occurred to him.

Many of the photos that illustrate the book are superb. Those by Hans Namuth capture the whirlwind of creative energy that both Pollock and de Kooning generated in their studios. A photo by John Gruen of O’Hara is a revelation of the openness of O’Hara’s personality.

“De Kooning’s Bicycle” is a hymn to the East End of Long Island, and of the influence it had on a few great American painters and writers. Though entertainingly and often sensitively written, its technique, mixing fact and fantasy, is flawed. “It is neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring,” as the proverb has it. And it tells only part of the story. The definitive book about the East End’s artists and writers remains to be written.

Mr. Volkmer, deputy treasurer of the village of Southampton, writes regularly about books and music for the Southampton Press.