In 1908, Harry Houdini—“The World’s Handcuff King and Prison Breaker”—needed a new act. He was thirty-four and had worked in show business for fifteen years. He had toured all over the United States, playing circus sideshows, vaudeville houses, and packed theatres of the Orpheum Circuit. As a beginner, he had performed with trained monkeys and fat ladies; a few years later, he did his tricks in a tuxedo with a boutonnière. In Europe, he had pulled off such stunts as escaping (in 1903) from the “Siberian Transport Cell,” a metal safe on wheels that was used to haul political renegades off to prison. It was a time of intense anti-Semitism in Russia, and Houdini, who was Jewish, wanted to flummox the tsarist politsiya. Indeed, he was an affront to authorities everywhere. He had conquered inspectors from Berlin and Scotland Yard, who chained him up and then watched, bewildered, as he broke free. But now, having spent most of the previous five years in Europe, he had to conquer America all over again. Never a great illusionist, he lacked mystery and atmosphere; his stagecraft was ordinary. As a mentalist, he would have been shamed by today’s master, Derren Brown. With a pack of cards in his hands, Houdini couldn’t kiss the hem of the late Ricky Jay’s rolled-up sleeve.

In St. Louis, Houdini and his assistants dragged onto the stage a sixty-gallon milk can, a larger version of the ones delivered to grocery stores. They filled it with water, the excess slopping over the sides as Houdini climbed in. There is a photograph of the act in which Houdini’s unsmiling face sticks out above the can (his knees were pulled up to his chest). Members of the local police—with helmets reaching down around their ears and impressively ugly mustaches—stand to the side, looking like nothing so much as the baffled cops who harassed Charlie Chaplin a few years later. The top of the can was padlocked, with Houdini submerged in the water—in later versions, done as promotional stunts, it was milk or beer. The curtain was drawn, and, after a minute or two, the crowd would become fretful. He was holding his breath as he tried to get out. What if he didn’t? “Failure means a drowning death,” as posters advertising the event warned.

Magic challenges our sense of what’s real; Houdini wanted to challenge the ultimate reality of death, by risking it over and over. That risk, he later wrote, is what “attracts us to the man who paints the flagstaff on the tall building, or to the ‘human fly,’ who scales the walls of the same building. If we knew that there was no possibility of either one of them falling or, if they did fall, that they wouldn’t injure themselves in any way, we wouldn’t pay any more attention to them than we do a nursemaid wheeling a baby carriage. Therefore, I said to myself, why not give the public a real thrill?” He depended on tricks, but the possibility of an accident or a miscalculation or a clumsy assistant was tangible enough.

Even before the milk-can stunt, Houdini had gone further than other magicians. Starting in San Francisco, in 1899, he often stripped naked in his handcuff routines. He was short but handsome, beautiful, even, with a wide brow, glittering dark eyes, and muscular arms, shoulders, and thighs. He would appear at some grim local jail or state prison, take off his clothes, and, to establish that he wasn’t hiding something on his person, undergo an intrusive inspection by a local medical examiner or police surgeon. He would then have himself locked in a cell, encumbered with shackles, and would emerge a short time later, holding them in his hand. Yet these simple escapes weren’t enough; he needed to outdo himself and astound his audience. In a later version of the milk-can act, called “The Chinese Water Torture Cell,” he was lowered, head first, into a large glass-fronted box filled with water. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, Houdini evoked actual cruelties—slavery and imprisonment, people cast into filthy cells and tormented for years. Of the glass box, he said, “It smacks of the Dark Ages.” He burrowed into the unconscious of the human race, evoking types of public sadism that had been suppressed, only to reëmerge in later eras: his stunts looked backward to the ducking stools of the witch trials and forward to such practices as waterboarding and “enhanced interrogation” under the George W. Bush Administration.

There are daredevils who scale the Eiffel Tower, or leap across the Great Wall of China on a skateboard, or plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel, but they don’t provoke endless interpretation years after their exploits; most movie stuntmen retire into knobby oblivion. Houdini’s strangeness and ambition—the nakedness, the liberationist triumphs—still fascinate us. A little guy who always escaped, he flourished in a century that saw mass incarceration, mass murder, the humiliation and destruction of entire populations. A few people, in his own time and in ours, have been convinced that his escapes were literal miracles. Edmund Wilson, more soberly, praised him in 1928 as a disciplined professional, “an audacious and independent being.” At the height of his career, he was almost as famous as Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino, both of them immigrants who re-created themselves in a new country eager for fantasy. Of the three, only Houdini risked killing himself on the job.

Two recent books have explored and enlarged the spell of his dominion. In “The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini” (Avid Reader), the sportswriter Joe Posnanski recounts his time delving into today’s “Houdini World,” the peculiar existence of Houdini obsessives—some professional magicians, many just cultists—who gather in clubs and at conventions, rendering homage, repeating stunts, exchanging the tiniest details of Houdini’s life. In “Houdini: The Elusive American” (Yale), the biographer Adam Begley tries to say, with good-humored seriousness, what kind of man Houdini was, and what he represented. It is not an easy task. In the familiar style of American popular artists, Houdini refused all interpretation. (John Ford: “I make Westerns.” Mel Brooks: “I’m just an entertainer.”) It is impossible, however, not to make a symbol out of a man hanging upside down in a straitjacket, sixty feet above Times Square. Almost from the beginning, Harry Houdini suggested some larger principle of being.

He was born Erik Weisz (later Americanized, sort of, to Ehrich Weiss) in Budapest on March 24, 1874. When he was four, he immigrated to this country with his mother and his brothers. His father had left Hungary two years earlier and settled in Appleton, Wisconsin, a mill town near Lake Winnebago, where he found a job as a rabbi. He was no longer young, though, and he didn’t speak much English. The fifteen German Jewish families of Appleton fired him after a few years, and the family moved to Milwaukee, where they were often hungry, and then to Manhattan—to a cold-water flat on East Seventy-fifth Street (at the time a slum) and to jobs in the garment industry, cutting the lining of neckties. In New York, Ehrich, watching his father slide into despair and ill health, vowed, like many immigrant children, never to be poor—and, even more important to him, never to allow his mother, Cecilia, whom he adored, to want for anything. Like Al Jolson and Irving Berlin, who were also children of Jewish clergymen, he launched into show business as the way out of ghetto jobs like stitching garments and rolling cigars. It was the first of his escapes.