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Robert D. Richardson, a prizewinning biographer who chronicled the lives of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, reconstructing their intellectual development in part through an unconventional method — devouring almost everything they had ever read, from Persian poetry to abolitionist tracts — died June 16 at a hospital in Hyannis, Mass. He was 86.

His wife, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard, said the cause was complications from a fall.

Mr. Richardson was an English professor at the University of Denver before embarking on a career as a biographer, drawing praise for works of vivid prose and authoritative scholarship. He wrote widely on literature, film and poetry, but his specialty was the “intellectual biography,” in which he aimed to understand the life through the work, as he put it, and “not the other way around.”

His reputation rested largely on three books, accounts of American intellectual giants who, like Mr. Richardson, graduated from Harvard University and spent years in New England: “Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind” (1986), “Emerson: The Mind on Fire” (1995) and “William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism” (2006).

The books were split into roughly 100 chapters, each only a few pages long, making for a propulsive reading experience that drew rapturous reviews. In <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/12/03/emerson-a-few-inches-from-calamity/" title="www.nybooks.com">a 2009 article</a> for the New York Review of Books, Irish novelist John Banville called Mr. Richardson’s biographical trilogy “one of the great achievements in contemporary American literary studies.”

“Aside from his learning, which is prodigious,” Banville continued, “Richardson writes a wonderfully fluent, agile prose; he has a poet’s sense of nuance and a novelist’s grasp of dramatic rhythm; he also displays a positive genius for apt quotation, the result of a total immersion in the work of his three very dissimilar yet subtly complementary thinkers. Can there be any more exciting critical writing than this?”

Mr. Richardson drew on the meticulous journals and diaries of his subjects to reconstruct their reading lists, then spent years working through the books himself. “He went and read every single book that they read and filled his own notebooks with quotations from passages that may have given them this idea or that idea,” Dillard said in a phone interview.

While he gave a narrative account of his subjects’ lives, he largely avoided analysis and speculation, focusing instead on their growth as writers and thinkers while making room for surprising personal details, such as Emerson’s fondness for pies at breakfast.

“It was Nabokov who pointed out that the most interesting part of a writer’s biography is the biography of his style,” he wrote in the preface to “William James,” his chronicle of the psychologist, philosophical pragmatist and older brother of novelist Henry James.

Mr. Richardson wrote his doctoral thesis on “Spoon River Anthology,” a collection by American poet Edgar Lee Masters, before turning toward Thoreau, an author he had initially dismissed during his years as a college student.

He began reading Thoreau more seriously while teaching American literature in Denver, where he found himself moved by the author’s descriptions of muskrats and other wildlife in the nature classic “Walden,” chronicling a year spent living near a pond outside Concord, Mass.

“Denver was my real Concord,” said Mr. Richardson, who recalled his shock at spotting a muskrat in the middle of the city — “2,000 miles from Walden Pond” — shortly before he began work on “Thoreau,” his first major biography.

The book’s fans included Dillard, whose 1974 nonfiction work “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” won a Pulitzer and drew comparisons to “Walden.” She sent Mr. Richardson a fan letter, and after “two lunches and three handshakes,” as she <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/28/specials/dillard-pilgrim.html" title="archive.nytimes.com">once put it</a>, they were married in 1988.

Mr. Richardson drew further acclaim for “Emerson,” which Washington Post book critic <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1995/04/09/journey-into-the-self/623ab5d3-a3f2-47f0-bde0-f67ad307e265/" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Michael Dirda called</a> “one of those exciting books that flash bolts of lightning across an entire intellectual era and up and down modern history.” A decade in the making, the biography drew out the “Sage of Concord’s” various sides as a suitor, widower, father and friend while examining his influence on writers such as Walt Whitman and Virginia Woolf.

“Emerson lived for ideas, but he did so with the reckless, headlong ardor of a lover,” Mr. Richardson wrote in the book’s preface. The author’s “main project,” he added, “was to write a natural history of intellect; I have tried to honor this aim by reconstructing the natural history of his enthusiasms.”

The biography received the Francis Parkman Prize, a top honor for works of American history, and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. Mr. Richardson later received the Bancroft Prize, another leading honor in American history, for “William James,” which the prize jury <a href="https://library.columbia.edu/about/news/libraries/2007/20070420_bancroft.html" title="library.columbia.edu">praised as</a> “a virtual intellectual genealogy of American liberalism and, indeed, of American intellectual life in general.”

<b></b>The first of three sons, Robert Dale Richardson III was born in Milwaukee on June 14, 1934, and later joked of petitioning to change his birth date because it matched President Trump’s. Despite his birth name, he used the name Robert Jr. for many of his books, apparently because he thought it sounded less pretentious.

His father was a Unitarian minister whose work led the family to settle in Massachusetts. The younger Mr. Richardson spent part of his childhood at a parsonage in Medford, across the street from where Emerson and Thoreau attended a meeting of the Transcendental Club. He later lived in Concord, where he rolled his eyes at buildings, streets, restaurants and bars named after Thoreau.

“My chief interests were not Emerson and Thoreau but getting a car and meeting girls,” he later <a href="https://www.kwls.org/key-wests-life-of-letters/concord-is-where-you-are-right-now-a-conversation-with-robert-d-richardson/" title="www.kwls.org">told an interviewer</a> with the Key West Literary Seminar, which Mr. Richardson helped lead as an honorary board member.

Mr. Richardson studied English at Harvard, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1956 and a PhD in 1961. In the late 1980s, he left the University of Denver for New England, teaching at schools including Wesleyan University before focusing on his books.

With Allen Mandelbaum, he edited the 800-page anthology “Three Centuries of American Poetry” (1999), later republished as “A Treasury of American Poetry.”

His other books included “First We Read, Then We Write” (2009), about Emerson’s approach to writing; “Splendor of Heart” (2013), about his Harvard mentor Walter Jackson Bate, a Pulitzer-winning biographer; and “Nearer the Heart’s Desire” (2016), a dual biography of Persian poet Omar Khayyam and “Rubaiyat” translator Edward FitzGerald.

Mr. Richardson’s first marriage, to Elizabeth Hall, ended in divorce. He later traveled up and down the East Coast with Dillard, splitting their time on Cape Cod, in Key West and in his-and-hers cabins separated by a few yards in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests in Virginia.

“He liked gentlemanly stuff: good whiskey, good cigars,” Dillard said. Mr. Richardson climbed the Matterhorn as a young man and later sailed an old wooden schooner, the Alamar, around Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. “It was slower than any other boat,” his wife added, “and still is.”

In addition to Dillard, survivors include two daughters from his first marriage, Lissa Richardson Biddle of Walnut Creek, Calif., and Anne K. Richardson of Los Angeles; three stepchildren, Carin Clevidence of Northampton, Mass., Shelly Clevidence of Virginia Beach; and author Cody-Rose Clevidence of Winslow, Ark.; a brother; and three grandchildren.

“Biography begins in the mysteries of temperament, lives in narrative, but aims beyond it, as the historian Jules Michelet understood, to resurrection,” Mr. Richardson wrote in “William James.” He went on to quote James himself, in a line that seemed to inform his approach to biography:

“Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.”

Read more <b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/">Washington Post obituaries</a></b>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/william-dement-psychiatrist-known-as-the-father-of-sleep-medicine-dies-at-91/2020/06/22/ca70e21a-b3c8-11ea-a510-55bf26485c93_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">William Dement, known as ‘the father of sleep medicine,’ dies at 91</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/kirk-r-smith-scientist-who-warned-of-health-hazards-of-open-fire-cooking-dies-at-73/2020/06/21/bb9d1204-b319-11ea-856d-5054296735e5_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Kirk R. Smith, scientist who warned of health hazards of open-fire cooking, dies at 73</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/felicity-bryan-british-literary-agent-who-spearheaded-journalism-fellowship-dies-at-74/2020/06/21/5f5e3bfc-ae47-11ea-8758-bfd1d045525a_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Felicity Bryan, British literary agent who spearheaded journalism fellowship, dies at 74</a>

Society of Professional Journalists D.C.'s Dateline Award for series, 2019

Society of Professional Obituary Writers' obituary writer of the year, 2019

University of Chicago, AB in English and philosophy

Harrison Smith is a reporter on The Washington Post's obituaries desk. Since joining the obituaries section in 2015, he has profiled big-game hunters, fallen dictators and Olympic champions. He sometimes covers the living as well, and previously co-founded the South Side Weekly, a community newspaper in Chicago.

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