The late Anglo-American writer Edmund Morris published one short book on Ludwig van Beethoven and two ambitious political biographies: a magisterial three-volume life of Theodore Roosevelt, which is likely to remain the preeminent account of Roosevelt’s life and works, and an authorized biography of President Ronald Reagan, which ended up as a curious, semifictional version of Reagan’s career and something of a mess. Edison, which Morris finished shortly before his death last spring at 79, falls somewhere between the two.

The book is a wise, well-informed, and largely compelling account of Thomas Alva Edison’s long life (1847-1931) and enduring influence on the modern world. It also begins with his death and works its way backward, decade by decade, to his birth and upbringing in the small-town Midwest of mid-19th-century America. Morris is very good at explaining, in accessible terms, the complicated mind and technical achievements of a man who was deliberately difficult to know but whose life’s work transformed the world we inhabit.