The release of “Seabiscuit” in 2001 coincided with a shift underway in nonfiction writing. Hillenbrand belongs to a generation of writers who emerged in response to the stylistic explosion of the 1960s. Pioneers of New Journalism like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer wanted to blur the line between literature and reportage by infusing true stories with verbal pyrotechnics and eccentric narrative voice. But many of the writers who began to appear in the 1990s — Susan Orlean, Erik Larson, Jon Krakauer, Katherine Boo and Nathaniel Philbrick — approached the craft of narrative journalism in a quieter way. They still built stories around characters and scenes, with dialogue and interior perspective, but they cast aside the linguistic showmanship that drew attention to the writing itself.

“There definitely was a generational shift,” Mark Bowden, the author of “Black Hawk Down,” told me. “One of the most obvious things about the New Journalism was the voice, but writers like me and Sebastian Junger were less interested in being either participants or very distinctive narrators. We’re just interested in telling great stories.” David Grann, the author of “The Lost City of Z,” told me that he makes a conscious effort to avoid stylistic flourishes. “The thing that is most important to me is I want to get out of the way,” he said. “I mean, I am very conscious of that. I’m not indicting people who have great voices, but in the stories I’m writing, the last thing I want is for the voice to get in the way or call attention to the author.” Hampton Sides, who wrote this summer’s blockbuster “In the Kingdom of Ice,” put it bluntly: “This generation has discovered that you don’t have to grab the reader by the lapels if you have a good story to tell.”

As much as any author working today, Hillenbrand embodies this stylistic discipline. She writes with the calm confidence that the careful arrangement of facts and details can impart the same narrative urgency as kandy-kolored adjectives and verbal pirouettes. Early in “Seabiscuit,” she introduces the jockey Red Pollard with a constellation of small observations to evoke a universe of inner conflict:

He was an elegant young man, tautly muscled, with a shock of supernaturally orange hair. Whenever he got near a mirror, he wetted down a comb and slicked the hair back like Tyrone Power, but it had a way of rearing up on him again. His face had a downward-sliding quality, as if his features were just beginning to melt.

He was, statistically speaking, one of the worst riders anywhere. Lately, at least. Once, he had been one of the best, but those years were far behind him. He had no money and no home; he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books: pocket volumes of Shakespeare, Omar Khayyám’s “Rubaiyat,” a little copy of Robert Service’s “Songs of the Sourdough,” maybe some Emerson, whom he called “Old Waldo.” The books were the closest things he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

In “Unbroken,” Hillenbrand blends the same intimacy with a technical mastery of wartime equipment. While writing my own book on the Pacific air campaign, I spent countless hours in the islands, with American airmen and even flying on old bombers, so I approached “Unbroken” cautiously. But I quickly found myself mesmerized by Hillenbrand’s ability to convey the texture of B-24 combat — the “broad, quick throbs of light in the clouds” and the “blaze of garish light” on the horizon and the way the tracers “streaked the air in yellow, red, and green.” Even in the heat of a battle sequence, Hillenbrand never loses sight of the individual men trapped in the fighting. After the assault on Wake Island of Christmas 1942, she describes the Japanese soldiers below “wearing only fundoshi undergarments, sprinting around in confusion,” while Zamperini’s crew, exhausted and battered, barrel away from the devastation with the retractable bottom of their plane jammed open, the wind roaring in and their fuel running out, even as the men themselves “could do nothing but wait and hope. They passed around pineapple juice and roast beef sandwiches.” This was the airman’s reality at war, caroming mercilessly between death’s edge and deadly boredom.

Hillenbrand’s approach has already begun to influence leading writers. The author Daniel James Brown has spent more than six months on The Times’s paperback list for his book about the 1936 U.S. Olympic rowing team, “The Boys in the Boat.” Over the past four months, he and Hillenbrand have held the top two positions nearly every week. Brown told me that even before he began writing his book, he had Hillenbrand’s in mind.

“When I first started ‘The Boys in the Boat’ — I mean, the day after I decided to write the book — I had an old paperback copy of ‘Seabiscuit,’ and we were going on a vacation,” he recalled. “So I threw it in my suitcase, and I spent the whole vacation dissecting it. I put notes on every page in the book, just studying all the writerly decisions she had made: why she started this scene this way and that scene that way, and the language choices in how she developed the setting.” Brown told me that his notes in “Seabiscuit” even influenced his reporting. “One of the things I wrote down in the margins of the book was that I needed to do this or I needed to do that,” he said. “I went into the whole research project with a list of guidelines, which were drawn from this close study of ‘Seabiscuit.' ”