Type "Ethan Allen" (1738-89) into a Google search and you will find some wonderful decorating ideas. Oh, wait, was he the one who turned traitor during the American Revolution? No, that was Benedict Arnold. This kind of confusion is understandable, when every publishing season hails another biography of an august George Washington, a lofty Thomas Jefferson or -- not far behind -- a cantankerous but principled John Adams.

So it is a pleasure to descend into the trenches of U.S. history with Willard Sterne Randall in his new book, "Ethan Allen: His Life and Times" (Norton, 578 pages, $29.95), which puts a good deal of flesh on the New England hero who captured the British-held Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775. A spirited man, Allen was, like other founding fathers, not averse to profiting from land speculation and accumulating wealth in ways that allied him as much with the old world as the new.

Allen is also notable for his unconventional "guerrilla warfare," and his searing accounts of his time as a British prisoner of war. It is, however, not well known that Allen (as Randall relates) found the cruelty of his fellow Americans -- especially those who remained loyal to the British crown -- far worse than what the British army had in store for him.

Randall, also the author of "Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor," is perfectly positioned to explore the mixed and sometimes enigmatic personalities of those patriots making the transition from a colonial to a republican world, where questions of personal prestige, family tradition and individual rights were fiercely debated, resulting in much contradictory conduct in the lives of men like Allen and Arnold.

Indeed, Randall's comparison of the two provides some of the more fascinating pages in this book. We follow Allen on a visit to Philadelphia, where he is incensed to find his "old rival, Major General Benedict Arnold," now military governor of the city, "coddling" Loyalists. What had happened to Arnold, a man who, like Allen, once had the ambition to conquer Canada?

Randall filters Arnold's biography through the picture Allen was able to piece together, providing a gripping account of how Arnold felt superseded and passed over for promotion in spite of his against-all-odds heroism, which resulted in crippling wounds to his legs. Without an income (Congress refused to pay him), Arnold began dealing in confiscated British goods and seeking favor among highly placed Loyalists. These activities resulted in his employment by the British secret service after Washington, who had larger matters on his mind, ignored Arnold's pleas for assistance.

Occasionally, Randall lets us down, as when he follows up riveting passages with statements of the obvious. Writing about Arnold and Allen, he observes that the two men followed "sharply different trajectories, reflecting divergent paths of the Revolution." True, very true. But why?

Carl Rollyson is a biographer and journalism professor at Baruch College, City University of New York.