Carlin, a First Amendment absolutist who died in 2008, would have gotten a kick out of the court’s decision (and a new routine as well). The ruling is a handy excuse to appreciate Carlin and praise a couple of excellent books about the comic: One is James Sullivan’s new biography “7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin.” The other is “Last Words,” a posthumous autobiography by Carlin and Tony Hendra that came out last November. Both are insightful stand-alone portraits of Carlin. But put them together and you get more than a multifaceted account of a comic’s career. You get a chronicle of a man’s psychological evolution — a slow unfurling of self-awareness that transformed Carlin from the colorful but safe performer he once believed he was fated to be, into the unique and courageous artist that he ultimately became.

Carlin recorded 22 solo albums and 14 HBO specials, won five Grammys, was nominated for five Emmys, appeared in over a dozen feature films, anchored four TV shows (including “The George Carlin Show” and “Shining Time Station”) and published three books. At the time of his death in 2008 he was recognized as a unique comic voice — not just a foulmouthed troublemaker but a hero to skeptics and rationalists, and a social critic in the tradition of Mark Twain. The Carlin depicted in posthumous appreciations was an uncompromising soul, targeting everyday stupidity, right-wing corporate fascism, left-wing political correctness, theocratic bullying, the homoerotic adoration of the military and other aspects of American delusion. “Politicians are there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice,” Carlin said in a rant titled “Who Really Controls America.” “You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners.”

Obituaries also portrayed him as a free speech pioneer following in the footsteps of Lenny Bruce (one of Carlin’s heroes, and an early Carlin booster). Superficially, the label made sense: Carlin was the subject of a 1978 Supreme Court case, sparked four years earlier when a New York radio show featured Carlin’s routine about the seven dirty words you can’t say on TV, and a listener wrote a fine-inducing letter to the FCC complaining that he shouldn’t have to risk hearing profanity during daylight hours while driving in the car with his young son. (Carlin never stopped blasting adults who tried to micromanage free expression under the guise of protecting kids. “Fuck the children!” Carlin growled in a same-titled routine. “They’re getting entirely too much attention.”)

Landmark court case aside, though, for the first three decades of Carlin’s career his material didn’t cut as deep as Bruce’s. It was content to skim the surface of American politics and culture and fixate on quirks of language and behavior and surreal images. The idea that Carlin’s career represented the continuation of Bruce’s legacy wasn’t borne out by the Carlin who entertained college students in the 1970s — a brainier, druggier ancestor of the soft observational comics who kept getting handed network sitcoms in the ’80s and ’90s. The image bore even less resemblance to the 1960s incarnation of Carlin — a mainstream clown whose routines adopted outward characteristics of beatnik and hippie subculture (notably the Hippie Dippie Weatherman) but rarely captured their alienation from America’s mainstream.

Carlin identified with outsiders his whole life. He collected jazz and R&B records, smoked prodigious amounts of pot, hung out with African-American airmen during his Air Force hitch, and wore buttons and T-shirts with left-wing political slogans offstage. During the Vietnam era he started taking LSD and growing his hair and beard out (incrementally, almost gingerly). But he couldn’t muster the nerve to let his inner freak cut loose because the entertainment industry’s powers-that-be — network executives, casino owners, nightclub bookers and Hollywood trade paper reporters — deemed such people dirty, disrespectful of authority, unpatriotic and, worst of all, uncommercial, and Carlin feared losing the money and industry status he’d worked so hard to accrue. As much as he claimed to prize truth, originality and unfettered self-expression — values that his hero Lenny Bruce epitomized — he was addicted to comfort. So he feigned edginess while playing it safe.

In “Last Words,” a rare showbiz autobiography filled with scathing self-criticism, Carlin admits he was a conformist throughout most of his career. “As I did more and more television,” Carlin says, “I began to realize that there was a price that you paid to do your stuff. You had to make believe you really cared about and belonged to the larger community of show business. That you were really interested in their small talk and shared whatever their values were. The two-track life was there all the time. I clung to the respectability and mainstreamness, yet I had no respect for the things stars did and talked about and seemed to glorify and find glory in.”

By the late ’60s, Carlin lavished praise on his more daring colleagues, including Richard Pryor, Flip Wilson and Mort Sahl, and hung out with innovative popular artists and left-wing activists. Yet he continued chasing roles in forgettable comedy films, flogging his counterculture mascot routine for nightclub and casino audiences, and doing guest shots on network variety shows (all of which, save “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” were toothless). In “Last Words,” Carlin says that sometime in the ’60s he grew disgusted with himself and wondered if he just should quit pretending, “change my name to Jackie Carlin, buy some white shoes, gold chains and pinkie rings.” He worried about “being on this rigid track, about being rewarded more and more for being cute and clever and funny. But not for being George Carlin.”

The traditions and restrictions that Carlin chafed at were all manifestations of the same, then-unquestioned assumption: that popular entertainment had to be as apolitical, sanitized and generally tame as could be. A baseline interpretation of that mandate meant a performer shouldn’t do or say anything that might violate commonly accepted standards of discourse, especially if the performance occurred in an unrestricted public setting (such as a TV talk show, or onstage at a state fair) or if women or children happened to be present. Here and there you could find little zones of expression that were exempt from the usual constraints: strip joints and bawdy nightclubs; big-city art-house cinemas; raunchy “party records” by performers who were known to work “blue,” such as Redd Foxx. But for the most part, America considered itself a clean country. Whenever a popular phenomenon challenged that perception — artful yet racy bestsellers, E.C. horror comics, Elvis Presley’s swiveling hips — its creators got smacked around by society’s gatekeepers: attacked on editorial pages, censored or pushed off the air by radio and TV executives, protested by conservative or religious groups, vilified in congressional hearings, even prosecuted in court.

The rules started to give way in the 1960s with the rise of counterculture sensibilities, and the slow ebb of once-powerful watchdog groups such as the National Legion of Decency. But the assumption that “popular” necessarily had to be a synonym for “inoffensive” persisted even though it didn’t make much sense anymore. The news was full of stories about battlefield carnage, police brutality, protests, assassinations, free love and acid trips. But you couldn’t address any of it in comedy except obliquely, often in a sniggering, reductive way that pandered to the Archie Bunker contingent. Comedians who tried to cut deeper were routinely censored by their bosses (see the Smothers Brothers) or exiled to pop culture’s hinterlands. To Lenny Bruce and like-minded comics that followed him, the insistence that pop culture had to avoid harsh reality was more offensive than the reality itself. George Carlin agreed with that sentiment. But for most of his career he didn’t have the stones to embrace it in public.

From the early ’70s onward, Carlin refocused his career on campus gigs and established his outlaw bona fides by getting busted for indecency and drug possession. But although his stand-up and recorded material grew weirder and raunchier, it still wasn’t as politically charged and confrontational as the voice he heard in his head. Carlin’s mostly gentle, bemused stage persona — that of a hip junior professor getting baked with the undergrads — didn’t convey the anger he felt when he contemplated Vietnam, Watergate, corporate corruption, and government harassment of anyone who looked and talked like the newer, scruffier Carlin. In “Last Words,” the comedian confesses that his stand-up didn’t capture his buried true self until 1988′s “What Am I Doing in New Jersey?,” a concert that railed against “Ronald Reagan and his criminal gang” and the “crypto-fascist” fundamentalists who supported him. (“I don’t know how you feel about it, but I am pretty sick and tired of these fucking church people.”)

The long-deferred unveiling of the fully self-actualized, near-final version of George Carlin — at the ripe old age of 51! — was sparked by the 1984 death of his mother, the militarism and greed of the Reagan era, and the emergence of Sam Kinison, who inspired the older comic “to raise my level to where I wasn’t lost in his dust.” Nearly all of Carlin’s most widely quoted routines — including “The Planet Is Fine,” “We Like War” and “Religion Is Bullshit” — were created during the last two decades of his life. By that stage, says Carlin in “Last Words,” he had figured out that the most honest and useful forms of self-expression were attempts to solve “the giant puzzle: ‘Who the fuck am I, how did I come together? What are the parts and how do they fit?’”

“7 Dirty Words” deepens Carlin’s posthumous memoir by putting his evolution in context. Sullivan deftly mixes quotes from Carlin’s friends, rivals, protégés, collaborators and employers with impeccably researched overviews of trends in radio, TV, the record industry and the nightclub circuit. The result is at once an engrossing account of Carlin’s life that rarely lapses into hero worship, and a highly readable survey of 20th century popular culture, stretching from the last gasp of vaudeville during the Depression through the rise of premium cable and the Internet. No matter how much you know, or think you know, about American show business, you’ll still learn a lot from this book.

The sections dealing with the “dirty words” case are especially good. Unlike Carlin in “Last Words,” Sullivan explores the muddled fallout of the Supreme Court’s decision — a 5-4 vote in favor of the FCC that validated the government’s ability to regulate the content of mass media without providing any guidelines. The decision, Sullivan writes, “passed on an opportunity to clarify which speech, if any, would be subjected to FCC reprimand moving forward.” Timothy Jay, a psychology professor known as a “scholar of swearing,” tells Sullivan, “One of the weaknesses of this decision is that the government offers no evidence that there’s anything harmful about this speech.” After the Carlin decision, the FCC has mostly passed up chances to spur more test cases. And with rare, usually silly exceptions, it has let artists, patrons and audiences decide what’s appropriate, and watched along with every other private citizen as pop culture got bluer and bluer.

Sullivan’s book is most valuable as a companion to “Last Words.” The autobiography fills in half of Carlin’s “giant puzzle” (“Who the fuck am I, how did I come together?”); “7 Dirty Words” completes the other half (“What are the parts and how do they fit?”).

The autobiography, for example, represents Carlin’s post-1988 work as a mostly unimpeded march toward total artistic integrity, briefly interrupted by heart attacks, tax problems and an ongoing struggle with drugs. Sullivan is more measured. Among other things, he shows that Carlin’s desire to be loved and accepted was another kind of addiction from which he never completely recovered. He got involved in surprising, sometimes challenging non-stand-up work (including a rarely seen supporting turn as a grimy, limping, free-spirited trader in a TV miniseries version of Larry McMurtry’s novel “Streets of Laredo“). But he also took on would-be moneymaking projects that evoked his diluted ’60s clowning (notably “The George Carlin Show,” a likable but lame Fox sitcom).

Such sidelights were rare, though. Both “Last Words” and “7 Dirty Words” agree that Carlin’s last two decades focused on exploring and defining who he was and what he stood for, then pouring his realizations into his stand-up — and that he was happier, more relevant and (paradoxically) richer and more influential as a result.

“Bum ticker and all, Carlin made it to 71,” Sullivan writes, “defining a half-century in American comedy.” Then he quotes his subject: “There’s always hope for comedians. You notice how long fucking George Burns, Groucho Marx, Milton Berle and all those cocksuckers lived? I think it’s because comedy gives you a way of renewing life energy. There’s something about the release of tension that comes from being a comic, having a comic mind, that makes you live forever.”

The writer of these words was Mabel Loomis Todd, wife of a philandering, ambitious Amherst astrology professor, longtime mistress to Dickinson’s brother Austin, future Dickinson editor and, as Lyndall Gordon argues in her new book, “Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds,” a pivotal figure in both Dickinson’s life and afterlife. She came onto the scene in 1881 with a generous sense of her own destiny and immediately swept the upright, much older Austin, long married with children, off his feet. That Austin’s son, Ned, had loved her first would prove to be just the first battle involving Mabel that eventually led Ned to describe her as “a woman who has brought nothing but a sword into the family.” There was also her struggle with Austin’s wife, Susan, a dear friend of Emily’s and the recipient of many of her poems, over his loyalties. Later, after Emily’s death and after it became clear Mabel would never wrest her lover away from his wife, there were standoffs — first with Susan and then with Emily’s sister Lavinia — for the rights, both moral and legal, to Dickinson’s poems and her reputation.

Amid all the triangulation was Emily herself, who managed — in an awesome feat of control that belies the popular image of her as a neurotic dreamer — never once to meet Mabel in spite of the fact that the lovers had their trysts in the poet’s library. Freed from the constraints of marriage, children and household duties by what Gordon posits, with a fair amount of backup, was epilepsy (rather than the broken heart usually cited as the cause for her seclusion), Dickinson “saved herself from the anarchy of her condition and put it to use.”

There is more than enough drama to go around in Gordon’s book — jealousies, deceit, the agonized shredding of wallpaper, even evidence of a ménage à  trois — and she often renders it in the plush detail of a potboiler. But beneath the operatic swell is an admirable amount of new information about Dickinson’s world and the choices she made in the service of what she recognized as her magnificent gift. She was far more fierce than we’ve been led to believe, which makes perfect sense given the work she left behind. Writing to Ned at a particularly difficult moment, she closed her letter with a command no less forceful for its affection: “And ever be sure of me, Lad” — a characteristically straight shot that echoes in every one of her poems.

Maybe it’s the ganja — well, definitely it’s the ganja, with its built-in third eye, its aura of secret significance. More fundamentally, though, it’s the transport, the release — the suprarational rewards music lovers love music for, which Marley claims are owed solely to the divinity of the Ethiopian autocrat Haile Selassie. Who are we to gainsay him, especially we white Babylonians? He has bestowed upon us this feeling of transcendence, and not only that, articulated a political consciousness that needs articulating. “I remember on the slave ship/How they brutalized our very souls/Today they say that we are free/Only to be chained in poverty” might not turn many heads at a socialist scholars conference, but by pop standards it’s a smart, blunt, hard-headed augury of militance. As a result, many all too readily suspend their disbelief when the politics turn out to herald twistier “reasonings,” as Rastas call their stoned biblical bull sessions.

So when I noticed Salewicz embellishing his first-chapter account of Marley’s fatal cancer with matriarch Cedella Booker’s conspiracy theories and backup singer Judy Mowatt’s lightning-bolt premonition, I said uh-oh. But these were feints. Davis’ “Bob Marley” is wrenching on Marley’s final months, Timothy White’s “Catch a Fire” provides unmatched blow-by-blow on the Marley estate, and both bring their own details to the life story proper. But Salewicz’s book is faster, fuller and fairer than either. It’s faster because through plenty of incident it sticks to the story, a welcome improvement on Salewicz’s bloated 2007 Joe Strummer bio. It’s fuller due not to Salewicz’s relatively late and limited personal contact with his subject, but to the spadework of the 11 other biographers he cites, the low-lying fruit he picked up during two years of living in Jamaica, and what looks from here like some plain old digging. As for fairer, well, Salewicz admires Bob Marley deeply without deifying him. That’s what I call reasoning.

Marley was born in 1945 to the 18-year-old daughter of a locally prominent black family in the Jamaican high country and a much older white bureaucrat who married the mother but barely knew the son. He moved to Kingston’s Trench Town ghetto at 12 and cut his first record at 17. For the next decade, he and fellow Wailers Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston grew in skill and Jah love as they negotiated the rough and tough Jamaican music business. Advised by a motley crew of thuggish Kingston minimoguls, devious Rastafarian elders, and small-time American bizzers, twice joining his mother in Delaware to replenish his capital in working-class jobs, he and the Wailers were the biggest thing in Jamaica by 1970. They performed in the States, undertook an abortive Swedish film project, and ended up in London. And in early 1972 they connected with Island Records’ Chris Blackwell, the great white record man who staked them to the breakthrough album “Catch a Fire.”

For most of his fans, Marley equals his Island output, and understandably so. Not only does it remain music of the highest quality, it was the engine of the cultural, spiritual and political quest that led to his deification — his “legend,” to cite the title of the Island compilation that has poured from the dorm rooms of millions of stoners since 1984. Nevertheless, this output reflects only a quarter of his tragically foreshortened 36-year life, for the previous quarter of which Marley was just as prolific. More than White and much more than Davis, though in less musical detail than the scrupulous academic Jason Toynbee (whose study is titled, what else, “Bob Marley“), Salewicz respects this truth without tackling the monumental job of codifying it. Near as I can count, the 1970 Jamaican hit “Duppy Conqueror,” later rerecorded for “Catch a Fire’s” ruder, stronger follow-up “Burnin’,” has appeared on some 300 Marley and reggae comps.

The first disc-plus of Tuff Gong’s “Songs of Freedom” box is a good introduction to Marley’s strictly Jamaican period, overlapping only slightly with Sanctuary’s highly recommended “The Essential Bob Marley & the Wailers” and barely at all with Heartbeat’s earlier, weaker “One Love at Studio One 1964-66.” But none of these include “Nice Time,” “Treat Her Right,” “The World Is Changing,” or “Black Progress,” all of which Salewicz tipped me to, or the Toynbee faves “I’m Still Waiting” and “Jailhouse,” not to mention “Milk Shake and Potato Chips,” a touching trifle I streamed because I liked the title. There’s not all that much sense to be made of a discography that embraces half a dozen producers, a hazily documented myriad of backup musicians, and material ranging from “Black Progress” to “Milk Shake and Potato Chips.” But dip in and many things become clear.

As a teen, Bob would do anything for a hit, including covers of “And I Love Her” and “What’s New Pussycat.” He loved American soul music but wasn’t always so great at it. He was militant early, as on 1968′s “Bus Dem Shut (Pyaka),” “bus” meaning “bust” and “pyaka” meaning “liar.” He was on top or ahead of every rhythmic shift in Jamaican pop and several elsewhere. He shared with certain country songwriters the ability to express deep content in simple language, both personal (think Hank Williams) and social (Merle Haggard). And most important in the long run, he had the gift of tune, devising songs so compelling that many from his 1969-71 flowering were inevitably reprised on Island: “Concrete Jungle,” “Slave Driver,” “Small Axe,” “Trench Town Rock,” “Lively Up Yourself,” “Kaya.”

There are purists who claim Marley’s music went north once he signed with Island, or broke with Tosh and Livingston, or enlisted American guitarist Al Anderson. But Salewicz isn’t among them. Like most observers, he sees Blackwell as an essentially benign force who helped Marley achieve “the international sound we were expecting to have” — a quote not from Marley but from Livingston, who felt so ill at ease in Babylon that he rejected the touring life for a sporadically inspired solo career as Bunny Wailer. Marley’s internationalism was better assimilated in Britain, where Jamaicans dominated the small black population, than in the U.S., where, as Marley knew all too well, a much larger black population preferred competing musics of its own. A cordial but ultimately rather private man, Marley drove himself hard, perfecting his stagecraft and writing a song a day as he studied scripture, pondered politricks, acted the don, played soccer barefoot, bedded innumerable women, and fathered what Salewicz reckons as 13 children by eight of them including his wife Rita, though estimates do vary.

Unsurprisingly, Marley’s choices and circumstances embroiled him in contradictions. I hesitate to say his insatiable womanizing is the least of them, especially since some of his kids had it so much better than others — his son Ky-Mani’s “Dear Dad” is a much better book about growing up in a drug-dealing culture than about music or his dear dad. But at least it’s a familiar pattern. Less so the man of peace who delivered the occasional beatdown and hired ropey-haired toughs who promoted his records by delivering many more. And what are we to make of the Marley who Salewicz reports watched the private executions of three men who’d tried to assassinate him shortly before his 1976 Smile Jamaica concert — a comeuppance that came down a week or so after his 1978 One Love Peace Concert, which Salewicz unconvincingly judges “one of the key civilizing moments of the twentieth century” because Marley got two warring politicians to grasp hands onstage for an awkward spell? But I was in fact more shocked by the famously generous philanthropist dropping 35 grand on a Miami dinner with a daughter of the Libyan oil minister, 1953 Chateau Lafite Rothschild included — and more saddened by Salewicz’s account of Marley’s embattled 1980 visit to a newly independent Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe’s cohort was already proving more autocratic than Ras Tafari’s.

To repeat, it was righteous of Salewicz to tell these tales. But that’s only because they don’t turn his book into a debunk. If it’s foolish to deify Bob Marley, it’s far more foolish to dismiss him, in effect blaming him for not living up to the magnitude of his achievement. Praise Peter and Bunny all you want — they deserve it. But credit Marley’s reservations: “Is like them don’t want understand mi can’t just play music fe Jamaica alone. Can’t learn that way. Mi get the most of mi learning when mi travel and talk to other people.” And recognize in that one-world bromide the seriousness of his cultural-spiritual-political ambitions. Salewicz reports that the assassins just mentioned were armed by the CIA, while others blame the right-wing Jamaican Labour Party. Probably not much difference, and either way you can trust his enemies to know his power. Most of the 14 million Americans who’ve bought the calculatedly anodyne “Legend” are in it for the herb. But Marley is very different for people of color such as the Tanzanian street vendors of Dar es Salaam’s Maskani district, one of many third-world subcultures to integrate his songs and image into a counterculture of resistance.

Peter and Bunny wouldn’t have brought Marley near such a consummation. Nor would the rhythmic muscle and dubwise byways of Lee “Scratch” Perry, whom the purists reasonably account Marley’s best and toughest producer. In fact, it worked pretty much the opposite. The gunmen who invaded Marley’s Kingston compound in 1976 managed to crease Bob’s arm and Rita’s skull. After playing the concert in bandages two days later, the two fled to England, where Marley took musical vengeance not by screaming bloody murder but by fulfilling his crossover dreams with heightened understanding, focus and subtlety. In six months he recorded all of “Exodus,” which Time magazine hyperbolically declared the greatest album of the century in 1999, and the equally blessed “Kaya,” which leads with the languorous “Easy Skanking” and climaxes with “Runnin’ Away” and “Time Will Tell” — this normally unalienated visionary’s haunted meditation on the confusions of fame followed by a promise of justice no tougher than anything else on his gentlest albums sonically and his most acute aesthetically. “Exodus” and “Kaya” opened the door on a three-year period in which he cemented his international fame while fighting the cancer he might have beaten if Rastafarianism looked more kindly on Babylonian medicine, amputation in particular — the disease began in a long-troublesome big toe he reinjured playing soccer barefoot.

Marley’s big Kingston concerts didn’t prevent Jamaica from turning into the most gun-ridden state in the western hemisphere. Lee “Scratch” Perry relocated to Switzerland. The Maskani district has been plowed under to make room for a bank. And reggae has evolved into a beat-dominated music of crotch-first sexism and toxic homophobia that’s far livelier than the Bob-worshipping hippie and Afrocentric crap that surfaces wherever spliffs are smoked or tourists go dancing. In short, Bob Marley has yet to remake the world — a failing he shares with just about everyone else who’s tried. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t changed it. Gandhi and King and Mandela didn’t leave utopias behind either, and unlike them, Marley was merely a musician no matter how much praise he proffered Jah. His music is as firmly ensconced in the pop pantheon as the Beatles’ or James Brown’s, and it signifies a remade world even if that doesn’t make it so.

A Redeemer? We don’t play that. “Redemption Song”? That we play. “Won’t you help to sing, these songs of freedom/Cause all I ever had/Redemption songs, redemption songs/Redemption songs.”

Maugham had been urged into this terrible misstep by his lover and general factotum, Alan Searle, who had been promised the proceeds from its publication, and by press baron Max Beaverbrook, who had newspaper sales on his mind. It was a miserable way to cap off a writing life which had made Maugham one of the most famous authors in the world and certainly the richest. That memoir, along with Maugham’s acrimonious, well-publicized break with his daughter and her family, his notorious thralldom to Searle, and the ever-continuing speculation about what wicked things went on at his villa on the French Riviera, have left a miasma around Maugham’s whole life. That he made bonfires of his papers and directed his correspondents to burn all his letters has not only thickened the air of unseemliness, but has also made writing a substantive biography difficult. Attempts have been made; but none so far has the scope and grace of Selina Hastings’s. Though she is the first biographer to be granted access to Maugham’s remaining papers, it is really her own command of the territory, empathetic judgment, and dexterous use of sources that make “The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham” the brilliant work that it is.

William Somerset Maugham, much the youngest of four surviving brothers, was born in 1874 in a rigged-up maternity ward in the British embassy in Paris, a little bit of England arranged for British subjects to evade having their newborns registered as French citizens. The first and all-encompassing tragedy of Maugham’s life was the death of his mother when he was eight, the trauma leaving him with a life-long stammer. A couple of years later, his father died and young Maugham was sent by himself to live with his married uncle, a clergyman, the model for the Vicar of Blackstable in the novel “Of Human Bondage” (1915). (“He was not a cruel man, but a stupid, hard man eaten up with a small sensuality.”)

Thus began the “period of utter desolation” that was the rest of Maugham’s childhood. At 16, he went to Heidelberg to learn German and, as it happens, to lose his virginity to a fellow Englishman. Returning to England a year later, he spent five years studying and practicing medicine at St Thomas’s, a charitable hospital in Lambeth. It was there, he said, that he learned everything he knew about human nature. The immediate result was his first novel, “Liza of Lambeth,” published in 1897, which launched his literary career — an impoverished one until he turned to the theatre in 1907.

His first play, “Lady Frederick,” a comedy of manners, was an immediate success, as were most of the plays that followed in the next two decades — a success, that is, at the box office and in the eyes of the general public. The mandarin view, expressed by the critic Desmond McCarthy, was more dyspeptic: “They were just cynical enough to make the sentimental-worldly think themselves tough-minded while they were enjoying them, and just brilliant enough to satisfy a London audience’s far from exacting standard of wit.” This pretty much sums up the high-literary disdain for Maugham’s work, books included, that endures today. It galled the author for the rest of his life: “The intelligentsia,” he wrote, “flung me, like Lucifer, headlong into the bottomless pit. I was taken aback and a little mortified.” Be that as it may, Maugham’s success as a playwright freed him from what had begun to seem the fiction writer’s drudgery: “Thank God,” he later recalled saying to himself, “I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it.” In fact, however, he did continue to write novels, short stories, and travel pieces — and, by the early 1930s, decided he loathed the theatre.

If the defining heartbreak in Maugham’s life was the death of his mother, its turmoil was, in one way or another, the result of his sexual orientation. The trial, imprisonment and ruination of Oscar Wilde in 1895 haunted him, lending urgency and a certain pathos to his insistence that he was three-quarters “normal” and only one-quarter “queer.” Maugham was convinced that to gain “peace and a settled and dignified way of life,” he should get married. Hastings conveys how truly and chillingly he believed this, to the extent, indeed, that even after his own harrowing experience with the married state, he still recommended it to his nephew Robin, also gay.

The first woman Maugham sought in marriage turned him down; the second relentlessly maneuvered him into it. This was Syrie Wellcome, separated wife of the pharmaceutical manufacturer Henry Wellcome, daughter of the social reformer Thomas Barnardo, mistress of Gordon Selfridge, the department store tycoon, and, in time, the model for Evelyn Waugh’s hardnosed operator, Mrs. Beaver, in “A Handful of Dust.”

To make a long, unedifying story short, the marriage was a disaster: The couple had nothing in common in taste or expectation. Moreover, as Hastings observes, Syrie “made the fatal mistake of falling in love with her husband.” Her neediness and jealousy were aggravated by Maugham’s having already found the love of his life in the American charmer Gerald Haxton: an outgoing hedonist, “a bit of a chancer,” and a bona fide sex pot. But the marriage was also doomed by Syrie’s “moral crassness,” best represented in her turning the Maugham establishment into an interior decorator’s salesroom. The last straw came when she sold her husband’s long-cherished writing table right out from under him.

Hastings brings an extraordinarily deft touch to the relationship between Maugham’s life and his many plays, novels and stories. She presents brisk summaries and just enough detail to place the works in the culture at large and, most nimbly, to illustrate what they drew from the circumstances of his own life. Maugham was a spy in Switzerland and Russia during the First World War, his experiences yielding “Ashenden: or the British Agent” (1928), which inaugurated the modern spy story (influencing Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and John Le Carré), and which also became required reading for entrants into MI5 and MI6. In the next war, after a grueling escape from the Continent ahead of the Nazis, Maugham became a propagandist in the United States, eventually going to Hollywood for a brief, disheartening, most entertainingly described period. He was a world traveler for most of his life, excursions which Hastings presents in adroitly assembled detail. The foreign trips allowed him to spend time with Haxton, whose earlier misdeeds had gotten him banned from Britain; but mostly he was drawn to the strange and exotic and was fascinated by the bitter tensions in colonial communities, all fodder for his pen.

His fiction reflected his appetite for news of other people’s lives, an appetite shared by his increasingly large audience of readers. On the other hand, those unfortunates whose own characters and circumstances had provided his subject matter felt violated. This was especially true of people he had heard of, met, or even been the guest of in those moribund colonial outposts, men and women who discovered their stories or something very like them in “The Trembling of a Leaf” (1921), “On a Chinese Screen” (1922), and “The Painted Veil” (1925). To be sure, London’s literary world provided rich fodder as well. Hugh Walpole, scarcely disguised as Alroy Kear in “Cakes and Ale” (1930) (which also features a Thomas Hardy-based character), was almost driven mad by the unflattering portrayal. It is hard not to think that Maugham’s popularity relied on his punishing eye as much as his storytelling might, considerable though that certainly is.

Maugham’s 30-year affair with Haxton ended unhappily, the younger man having become an impossible drunk, to some extent because he had nothing to show for his life except his relationship with Maugham. His death plunged Maugham into a frenzy of grief and self-castigation. In Alan Searle, his final lover, Maugham sought “the ideal companion,” but instead found a man whose sweetness was offset by “something unctuous and money-grubbing in his demeanor.” Developing into a “podgy Iago,” Searle bore an animus against Maugham’s daughter and connived at the old man’s paranoia and isolation. In 1965, Maugham finally died, demented and terrified, in the Villa Mauresque in Cap Ferrat, once the scene of untold, perhaps unspeakable, revelry.

Hastings is masterful throughout in creating a sense of place and personality, melding sources with an alchemist’s hand to create a lively, seamless narrative rich in apposite quotation. She has also furnished the book with excellent, telling photographs of most of the major players. It is impossible to think that this biography will ever be surpassed.

“Young Romantics” focuses on two complicated households, one lastingly notorious, the other now nearly forgotten. The first is the family group surrounding the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, which included his wife, Mary Shelley (author of “Frankenstein”), and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. The second belonged to a journalist, critic and poet named Leigh Hunt, whose two-year incarceration in the Surrey County Jail for the crime of criticizing the Prince Regent kicks off Hay’s narrative. The two other major poets of this circle, Lord Byron and John Keats, come into the story as well, of course, though Byron played a larger part than Keats — who had the sense to stay out of most of the bigger messes his cohorts got into.

This second generation of Romantic poets (after the group led by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the 1790s) shaped our contemporary conceptions of creativity and morality so profoundly that it’s safe to say we’ve never really gotten over them. It’s become a cliché to call them the first hippies, rock stars and celebrities; above all, these men and women defined what it means to be an artist in the modern age — a heroic, if lonely figure who insists on remaining true to his genius in a harsh and venal world. Hay explains that she hopes, with “Young Romantics,” to look “beyond the image of the isolated poet in order to restore relationships to the center of the Romantic story.” In this, she’s attempting a bold revision of how the Romantics portrayed themselves and at the same time tapping into our long-standing infatuation with the idea of a community of brilliant free spirits, inspiring and infuriating each other via a web of friendships, love affairs and feuds.

Hay works in a shadow; Richard Holmes, arguably our greatest living biographer, specializes in the Romantics. (His “The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science” was among the most celebrated works of nonfiction published last year.) Hay doesn’t write as captivatingly as Holmes does — but then, neither does anyone else. The strength of “Young Romantics” lies in its perspective, not so much on her subjects’ works (the critical passages in the book are perfunctory) as on the delights and agonies of la vie boheme as it was lived in its early days.

Hunt and Shelley both longed to create countercultural communities, and made several creditable stabs at it. Perversely, getting tossed in the clink turned out to be a blessing for the impractical Hunt, who was co-owner, editor and chief contributor at a liberal newspaper, the Examiner. In those days, with enough money and the right friends, a jail cell could be comfortably outfitted; Hunt had a charming room with flowered wallpaper and a private garden in the midst of an otherwise dank prison. His confinement, and his principled conduct in the face of it, made him a hero to the reform-minded left, and as he penned a series of influential columns about European politics, his parlor received a steady stream of notable visitors and patrons.

As a result, Hunt became the center of a group whose “emergent identity” was based on the ideal of “sociability,” described by Hay as “an experiment in living which elevated the rituals of friendship — communal dining, music-making, letter writing , shared reading — so that these rituals … took on a cooperative, oppositional significance.” How people, especially creative people, conducted their personal lives became not just a political statement, but a kind of political activity at a time when the British government was trying to tamp down rising popular discontent with a raft of oppressive new laws.

No one could have endorsed this vision more fervently than Shelley, an aristocratic proponent of radicalism and free love who’d been expelled from Oxford for his atheistic views. His mentor in these beliefs was the political philosopher William Godwin, who turned dishearteningly unsympathetic when Shelley eloped with his 16-year-old daughter, Mary, in 1814. (Shelley already had a wife, and a pregnant one at that.) The “immorality” of their relationship made living in England, or in any other settled situation, difficult for the young couple, but eventually (after the suicide of his first wife) Shelley and Mary did get married, and the second half of “Young Romantics” describes the poet’s efforts to forge assemblies of like-minded friends, including Byron, in various Italian cities.

Money and sex usually conspired to foil these plans, or to cut them short. The impecunious Hunt was always hitting up his exasperated friends for loans; Dickens based the sponging Harold Skimpole, in “Bleak House,” on him. And for all their lofty ideals, Shelley and Hunt could be stunningly insensitive to the women in their lives, the ones who had to suffer most of the consequences of all that free love. Claire Clairmont, whose relationship with Shelley was ambiguous at best, bore Byron’s illegitimate child, a daughter she adored but who was taken away from her and died in a convent at the age of 4. By the time “Young Romantics” gets to the year 1822, when Shelley drowned in a boating accident, it comes as a jolt to learn that Mary Shelley had run away to Europe with a great poet, written a seminal English novel, buried three children (only her fourth survived to adulthood) and lost her soul mate — all by the age of 25.

Whether or not they were formidable thinkers (like Mary Shelley) or intrepid adventurers (like Claire), the women in these artsy enclaves had the unenviable task of running the households where revolutionary sociability was cultivated. Most of these establishments included extra women of uncertain status, usually sisters. Hunt, Shelley and Byron all wrote poems featuring brother-sister incest and were rumored to have such propensities, which didn’t make being part of their domestic entourages any easier. (Only Byron actually appears to have slept with a blood relation, his half-sister, Augusta, but a dalliance with a sister-in-law was considered quasi-incestuous at the time.) Claire eventually fled to Russia — viewed by the English as a barbarous outpost — to seek work as a governess, hoping to escape the taint of her association with Shelley and Byron. One of Hay’s research discoveries is an autobiographical fragment by Claire, in which she indicts both Shelley and Byron as “monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery,” primarily for their championing of free love.

But the two poets could also be kind and magnanimous, and they were certainly correct in thinking that Claire was more wronged by the sexual mores of her time than by either of them. Hay — a stolid rather than a lyrical writer — is better at pruning back the moral thickets of these relationships than she is at invoking why so many people got swept up in Byron’s charisma, Percy Shelley’s radiant idealism, Keats’ meltingly lovely verse or Mary Shelley’s ethical intelligence in the first place. No matter; their lives were also a kind of art, and one that never fails to cast its spell.