In the last year, David Remnick has written long, complex feature stories, each running into thousands of words, about subjects as diverse as the uprising in Egypt, the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and the future of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. He also edits The New Yorker, the magazine for which he writes so prolifically—to a degree that is unique in the history of the renowned American weekly, and perhaps in all of contemporary journalism. Remnick is also a conscientious blogger: He blew off a dinner party on the first night of the Jaipur Literature Festival, which started on 20 January, because he was busy writing about the cancellation of SalmanRushdie’s visit for Newyorker.com.

Barack Obama, subjects of Remnick’s biographies.Haraz N Ghanbari/AP

Journalists around the world who admire The New Yorker respect and fear this reportorial stamina. Too often, the first question Remnick is asked is how he finds the time to write so much (one he deflects in Jaipur by saying, “I have three children”). But to focus on his productivity is to miss the quality of his journalism and its influence on journalists today.

1994’s Lenin’s Tomb, Remnick’s Pulitzer Prize-winning first book, came out of his work as The Washington Post’s correspondent in Russia between 1988 and 1992. He calls it “a big, sprawling mess” of a book; “I would have hated myself if a book hadn’t come out of that time,” he says. In 1998, he went back to produce a long-form look at a new Russia, Resurrection.

But Remnick’s greatest achievement as a reporter is perhaps his gift for writing time and place by writing about the people who inhabit them, and nowhere is this more evident than in his two later works, the biographies of Muhammad Ali and Barack Obama, which are also social histories of America.

Remnick says he chose to write about Ali because he wanted a “start-to-finish story”, although neither King of the World: Muhammad Aliand the Rise of an American Hero (1999) nor The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), are strictly conventional in that respect. The Bridge captures a man whose biography, some would say, is only just beginning. Remnick’s conversations with Ali, already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, bracket King of the World’s narrative of Ali’s childhood and his career up until his refusal of the Vietnam War draft, without seeming to intrude on it.

In long form: David Remnick in Jaipur.(Jasjeet Plaha/Hindustan Times)

Race connects both his subjects and the context of these books, but they are discrete entities to Remnick. “There is an American particularity to the self-creation of this man,” he says of Ali. Self-creation interests Remnick. It draws him again, years later, to Obama, whom he finds a puzzle: a junior senator with a slim legislative record who takes up the burden of history, and appears to sweep a nation along with him.

King of the World goes over the elements of Ali’s self-creation, understanding Ali by investigating his beginnings as Cassius Clay, as the man who built himself up in opposition to his competitors like Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. Remnick traces how Ali talks himself into being, as a polarizing public figure, “beautiful, confident, funny, incredibly funny”, as Remnick now says.

But that alone would have made the book an incomplete story and an overfamiliar one. Remnick also closely reads the sports writing that rose up around Ali, from forgotten bylines in local newspapers to the way everyone from A.J. Liebling to Norman Mailer and James Baldwin wrote about the deeply troubling, gladiatorial spectacle of African-American men fighting for the pleasure of a white audience.

Remnick does not editorialize the incendiary drama of Ali’s life; it flowers, monumentally, through fact, record and quotation—the small tools of journalism. The assembled picture, backed authoritatively by Remnick’s measured tone, is a moving explanation of what Ali meant to his time, and indeed to his people.

Remnick put Ali away when writing his second biography. “Ali was not an intellectual,” he says. “Obama is very much one.” That makes him singular in American political life, in some ways. “You know, if you were in a room with someone like Bill Clinton, he would hold you, look at you and talk to you as though you were the only person in the room. He would do that to everyone in the room. Clinton is a typical American public figure in some ways. Obama is recessive—different.”

The Bridge was an attempt to understand this reserved Obama who now overwhelms the inspirational, reconciliatory, Joshua-generation African-American who practised himself into being on the campaign trail, and for whose electoral victory people shed tears of joy. This Obama is the figure who emerges in an earlier book, against which Remnick is writing in some ways: Obama’s own accomplished early memoir, Dreams From My Father.

Muhammad Ali (Harry Benson/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“That was a genuine question for me,” Remnick says, about deconstructing the writing of a man who is already his own finest chronicler. “That’s why one of the chapters of The Bridge is about that book. It was the sort of book that enthusiastic publishers would say was ‘well-received’. Here is this kid, out of Harvard Law School, a community organizer in Chicago. His one confidence booster is being elected president of The Harvard Law Review. So what—they have a new one every year. So who is this guy? What is this story about? Why is the parent who brought him up nowhere to be found in this narrative, and the absent parent such a major part of it?”

The Bridge is a literary work, not just because Remnick’s writing is elegant. It is an editorialization of Obama’s own narrative, which Remnick links to the earliest narratives of African-American slaves, whose literature is a device of identity. If it seems less politically critical in the succeeding months of the Obama presidency, it is because it was always meant to capture a moment, and not its aftermath. It tells an evolving story and is limited by its time. But taken together with Remnick’s continued examination of Obama and his career in the The New Yorker, it will be an important record of the presidency.

Among Indian practitioners of English-language biography—a small tribe—readers may find echoes of Remnick’s practice in Ramachandra Guha’s 1999 biography of Verrier Elwin. While Guha writes as a scholar and Remnick as a journalist, a few things unite them. Both prefer to narrate their stories at a certain distance from the subject, but neither pretends to be uninterested: Elwin is one of Guha’s major influences, Remnick unmistakably sees Ali as one of America’s heroes, and The New Yorker under Remnick endorsed Obama for US president in 2008. Both write as political liberals, deeply invested in the way history is told in their respective nations. Both couch a talent for muted drollery—sometimes a little too successfully—with quiet sentences and classically linear narratives that leave no room for factual ambiguity, and no chance for second-guessing authorial intention.

“I’m conservative on the issue of facticity,” Remnick says. “I am not of the school where everything is a text and there are no boundaries, and the reader will figure it out. Part of this is influenced by the fact that I’m an editor, and feel that if I’m going to ask you to believe Seymour Hersh’s piece on Abu Ghraib in all its facts, then I need that. When I’m calling something non-fiction, it had better be.”

“On the other hand, I don’t want to be boring. If I’m going to give you a 15,000-word piece to read, whether as an editor or a writer, I want you to read to the end. I don’t want the reader to go ‘Uhuh, uhuh, uhuh’, lose interest and start thinking about what’s on television or check their email in the middle. I want them to forget about their email, what might be on television, and dream in the space of the piece.”

supriya.n@livemint.com