The three epigraphs that usher the reader into the massive edifice of “Team of Rivals” (Simon and Schuster, 879 pages, $35), the newest book by popular historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, chart the unstoppable rise of the myth of Abraham Lincoln. The first quotation comes 1860, when Lincoln had just surprised the nation by snatching the Republican presidential nomination away from the much more distinguished frontrunner, William Henry Seward. Seward’s home-state paper, the New York Herald, editorialized that the Republicans had shown “small intellect, growing smaller. They pass over … statesmen and able men, and they take up a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar.” By 1879, however, we find Walt Whitman declaring that “if the old Greeks had had this man, what trilogies – what epics – would have been made out of him!” And in 1909, Leo Tolstoy could write that “the greatness of Napoleon, Caesar or Washington is only moonlight by the sun of Lincoln.” In half a century, Lincoln had gone from a provincial mediocrity to the greatest man who ever lived.

Historians’ attempt to understand how and why this happened began with Lincoln’s assassination and has yet to end. Lincoln’s story is, of course, the story of the Civil War; like Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt, it was war that raised Lincoln above the usual run of politicians to occupy the White House. But even his role in the war does not entirely account for Lincoln’s fascination. As Whitman suggested, Lincoln was like the Greek tragic heroes in being as large as his fate – a victim of events, but also their antagonist and finally their master. And while Lincoln is too modern and well-known a figure to be mythologized like Oedipus or Richard II, the historians have in a sense fulfilled Whitman’s dream. They, and not the poets and novelists, have been the ones to keep Lincoln alive in the American imagination.

In fact, Ms. Goodwin’s is just one of two high-profile books on Lincoln to appear this month, each offering a new approach to the familiar story. “Team of Rivals” places Lincoln, whose iconic status tends to make us divorce him from his peers, firmly in the context of his political competitors. Ms. Goodwin’s Lincoln is a virtuoso politician, a born manager of men, who knows how to get people not only to do what he wants, but to do it happily. In the recollections of cabinet members, secretaries, and casual visitors, thoroughly combed by Ms. Goodwin, we see him putting everyone at ease – using Western slang, reading out funny stories from the newspaper, forgiving all injuries and never holding a grudge. This is the man that Frederick Douglass met during his historic visit to the White House: “I was never more quickly or more completely put at ease in the presence of a great man than in that of Abraham Lincoln.”

The Lincoln we get to know in Joshua Wolf Shenk’s “Lincoln’s Melancholy” (Houghton Mifflin, 352 pages, $25) on the other hand, is deeply solitary, cut off even from his intimates by a constant, brooding depression. This is the Lincoln who, long before the White House was in his sights, suffered two nervous breakdowns, the second so bad that his friends seriously feared he would commit suicide. Joshua Speed, his roommate during the frightening episode of January 1841, recalled: “Lincoln went Crazy – had to remove razors from his room – take away all Knives and other such dangerous things.” This Lincoln met each of his triumphs with a weary detachment bordering on despair. At the Republican state convention in 1860, after Lincoln had secured his state’s support for the presidential nomination, one delegate called the victorious candidate “one of the most diffident and worst plagued men I ever saw.”

For every witness Ms. Goodwin brings to the bar to testify to Lincoln’s sense of humor and easy manner, Mr. Shenk finds another to remark on his natural expression of gloom: “No element of Mr. Lincoln’s character,” said one Illinois colleague, “was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy.” Ms. Goodwin and Mr. Shenk come to seem like the blindfolded men in the fable, who describe entirely different elephants depending on whether they’re holding the trunk or the tail. The Lincolns they describe are not mutually exclusive, however; they are the products of two very different approaches to history writing.

“Team of Rivals” is well-executed popular history from one of the masters of the genre, but that genre – the great man door-stopper – has important limitations. It is good at narrating events in colorful detail, and capable of sketching important political issues. Ms. Goodwin gives an accessible overview of the debates and factions dividing the Republican Party in the 1860s, and shows in detail what it took to run for and govern as president in a newspaper driven, patronage-hungry America. But the form is not suited to venturing novel psychological insights or conveying the full moral complexity of events.

Thus, while Ms. Goodwin divides her focus between Lincoln and his three rivals for the Republican nomination in 1860, each major character tends to get reduced to a few unchanging adjectives. She gives us an intelligent, genial Seward, who after losing the nomination campaigned hard for Lincoln and became his indispensable secretary of state; an ambitious, priggish Salmon Chase, who took his defeat much less well, and continued to plot against Lincoln while serving as his secretary of the treasury; and a patriarchal Edward Bates, who would rather have stayed at home with his St. Louis clan, but agreed to serve as attorney general.

We learn a lot about the internal politics of the Lincoln Administration but much less about the actual policies these men carried out, and the multiplication of protagonists prevents any of them from taking on full-fledged literary life. It is also responsible for the book’s bloat: Ms. Goodwin’s digressions on Chase’s daughter’s social life, or local political feuds in Missouri, make “Team of Rivals” feel as long as it looks. It never becomes clear exactly why Ms. Goodwin chose to write about Lincoln in this way, at this time.

“Lincoln’s Melancholy” is a more narrowly focused work, but it manages to provide more food for thought. Mr. Shenk insists that his book, while attempting to shed light on the dark places of Lincoln’s mind, is “not a psychobiography”: he does not offer up any simplistic Freudian key to explain why Lincoln suffered and achieved so much. Instead, Mr. Shenk does something at once more modest and more valuable. “The goal,” he explains, “has been to see what we can learn about Lincoln by looking at him through the lens of his melancholy, and to see what we can learn about melancholy by looking at it in the light of Lincoln’s experience.” That willingness to let the past interrogate the present, to confront our tidy psychological theories about depression with Lincoln’s complexity, makes “Lincoln’s Melancholy” more than a biography. Rather, it becomes a kind of moral essay, pleasingly earnest, about the uses of suffering.

Mr. Shenk makes clear that, if Lincoln could be treated by a present-day psychiatrist, he would certainly be diagnosed with a depressive disorder. He suffered two major breakdowns in early manhood, and his withdrawn gloominess was obvious to everyone who met him. But Mr. Shenk also shows how Lincoln used the struggle to master his melancholy as an inspiration for his great public achievements. At the depth of his nervous crisis in 1841, he famously told a friend that the only thing that prevented him from committing suicide, the thing he “desired to live for,” was his “irrepressible desire … to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man.”

Mr. Shenk argues, convincingly, that many of Lincoln’s vital and mysterious gifts – his realism, his perseverance, his willingness to be hard on himself and patient with others – were fruits of his struggle with depression. “Lincoln’s Melancholy” is a humane book with a wise message; the only melancholy thing about it is the reflection that Lincoln’s inability to be banally cheerful would certainly prevent him from being elected president today.

akirsch@nysun.com