Toussaint Louverture:      A Biography by      Madison Smartt Bell

His new "Toussaint Louverture" is a straightforward biography of 333 pages that focuses on the public figure of the years 1791-1802. His trilogy of historical novels (published 1995-2004) covers the same period in just over 2,000 pages.

Both works retrace the little that is known about Toussaint up to his late 40s (his given birth year ranges from 1739 to 1746; he died in 1803), when he became a focal point of rebellion, war and politics with international repercussions. It was a remarkable life in an extraordinary time.

Born into slavery, Toussaint became a plantation overseer, acquired freedom and literacy, and owned at least one plantation with slaves himself. As a rebel leader, he groomed an army, dealt with blandishments and threats from Spain, Britain, the US and France, abolished slavery, wrote a constitution and declared himself governor for life.

Paris couldn't accept emancipation. The island's labor-intensive sugar plantations brought wealth to a nation financially drained by war. Napoleon sent an invasion force; more than 50,000 of its soldiers died in battle or from disease.

Toussaint proved to be a wily general and a master of the island's mountainous terrain, over which he raced tirelessly on his white horse. In the end he negotiated a truce and retired with honor -- but he was duped and deported to France, where he died in prison.

Bell's biography has a scholarly dryness that reflects the considerable research he put into the novels and perhaps an earnest caution after all the liberties taken in the fiction.

The fiction fills gaps in the life and enlivens known facts with imagined events, of course, but it does much more: It gives human faces to the complex racial distinctions at the heart of the bloody conflict. (In an appendix, Bell cites more than 100 racial classifications.) It frees the narrative from the constraints of chronicle, moving constantly around the island and bringing sex, manners and mores onto the page in ways history rarely can.

The biography's writing is generally crisp; it sketches the turmoil in and among the Western powers, placing Toussaint amid the era's two epochal revolutions. The trilogy is lush with detail but also digressive, revoltingly violent (especially in the first volume), prone to melodrama and dependent on an implausibly high survival rate (given the wholesale slaughter of those years) for its principal players.

Which to read? There's a case for doing both, in tandem, maybe after a speed-reading course. The novels are allusive about many of the historical events the biography presents clearly.

Sometimes, though, facts fall short. The biography gives you the size of Toussaint's cell in the Jura Mountains of France, the prisoner's meager supply of food and fuel.

The novels add the dankness, the dying embers, the chill of the stone underfoot and the general's piercing memory of himself on horseback racing along mountain paths in sunshine and in moonlight, as powerful and as free as any man alive.

"Toussaint Louverture: A Biography" is published by Pantheon (333 pages, $27). The trilogy -- "All Souls' Rising," "Master of the Crossroads" and "The Stone That the Builder Refused" -- is available in paperback from Vintage.

(Jeffrey Burke is an editor for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)