Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Maria Callas, Judy Garland, Jack Kerouac: these and other giants of popular culture were long ago explored to death, yet biographers keep struggling to give the old stories a new spin. With most of the eyewitnesses gone, however, and the tattered clippings picked dry, writers are left to “reinterpret” the facts, leaning heavily on imagination. Many of their books enter a gray zone of shady ­credibility.

In 1947, when Frank Sinatra was only 32, the New Yorker writer E. J. Kahn Jr. wrote the first book about him, “The Voice: The Story of an American Phenomenon.” Kahn quotes a journalist who said foreknowingly, “Perhaps Frankie is more important a symbol than most of us are aware.” Since then, dozens more authors have tried to crack the mystique of a star who barely made a move that wouldn’t be deemed historic. Aside from revolutionizing the art of popular singing — which he took from strident and bravura to the most nuanced form of storytelling — Sinatra redefined prevailing notions of masculinity. His balance of tough, tender and cool made him the heterosexual male’s ultimate role model. For women, he was the ideal: a sensitive man’s man.

His life is a biographer’s field day. Among its details are a Hoboken upbringing with an abortionist mother; the hardscrabble but exciting swing era, which ignited his career; his ascent to superstardom in the war years, when he awakened the lust in countless screaming girls; the youthful marriage (to the long-suffering homebody Nancy Barbato) that was torn asunder by Ava Gardner, over whom he attempted suicide. Mafia ties, arrests and other scandals kept his hands dirty for years.

For an author to tackle this epic again would require, at the very least, a lot of nerve. And nerve is everywhere in the newest effort by James Kaplan, co-author of memoirs by John McEnroe (“You Cannot Be Serious”) and Jerry Lewis (“Dean and Me”). “Frank: The Voice” takes more than 700 pages to tell half the story: that of Sinatra’s rise, his late-1940s career crash and his phoenix-like rebirth in 1954, when he claimed an Oscar for best supporting actor in “From Here to Eternity.” (Kaplan is now at work on Volume 2.) There’s scarcely a fresh tidbit here; the source notes list fewer than 20 original interviews, while the bibliography contains about 125 books.