David S. Reynolds


David S. Reynolds is an American literary critic, biographer, and historian who has written about American literature and culture. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, on the Civil War era—including figures such as Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Lippard, and John Brown. Reynolds has been awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Christian Gauss Award, the Ambassador Book Award, the Gustavus Myers Book Award, the John Hope Franklin Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a regular reviewer for the New York Times Book Review.

Early life and education

Reynolds was born in Providence, Rhode Island on August 30, 1948, and was raised nearby in Barrington, located near Narragansett Bay. He attended the Moses Brown School and the Providence Country Day School before moving on to Amherst College, where he received a B. A. in 1970.
After teaching high school English at the Providence Country Day School for a year, he pursued his graduate studies in American literature and American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1979.

Teaching career

Reynolds has taught American literature and American Studies at Northwestern University, Barnard College, Rutgers University-Camden, New York University, Baruch College, and the -Paris III. Since 2006, he has been a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Writings and influence

Cultural Biography

Reynolds is a proponent of cultural biography, contextualizing historical figures in their era. He was influenced by the “representative men” theory of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who writes, “the ideas of the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it… We learn of our contemporaries what they know without effort, and almost through the pores of our skin.” In Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times Reynolds challenges the usual view of Lincoln as the quintessential self-made man who arose, without education or guidance, from a crude background and a barren American culture that offered few nurturing materials. Instead, Reynolds shows, Lincoln learned a lot from a rich, teeming cultural environment that he absorbed and rechanneled in his brilliant presidency and his immortal speeches.Reynolds argues in John Brown, Abolitionist that Brown was not an isolated, crazed antislavery terrorist but rather an amalgam of social currents—religious, racial, reformist, political—that found explosive realization in him. In Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, Reynolds takes seriously Whitman’s declarations that he was “the age transfigured” and that “in estimating my volumes, the world’s current times and deeds, and their spirit, must first be profoundly estimated.” Reynolds writes that Whitman’s growing alarm over political controversies, corruption, and class division led him to try to heal his nation through his poetry, which absorbed images from many aspects of social and cultural life, including religion, science, city life, theater, oratory, photography, painting, reform movements, and sexual mores.

American history

Reynolds highlights the intersection of politics and culture consistent with Lincoln’s view that “public sentiment is everything. He who molds public sentiment is greater than he who makes statutes,” Reynolds includes in books like John Brown, Abolitionist, Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, and Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson political and social leaders, artists, musicians, reformers, scientists, artists, ministers, and self-styled religious prophets who shaped American history. In Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, he traces the impact of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 best-seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the rise of Lincoln, the American Civil War, and worldwide events, including the end of serfdom in Russia, down to its influence on race relations and popular culture in the twentieth century.

Literary criticism

Reynolds debunks the once-prevalent view—introduced by the New Critics and later promoted by the deconstructionists and other theorists—that literature is divorced from the author's life and contexts. His reconstruction of the cultural and social contexts of literature began with his book Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America, which explores some 250 writers from Puritan times through the late 19th century. In Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville, Reynolds leverages the title of F.O. Matthiessen's best known work and expands his thesis. Here Reynolds combines elements of New Historicism and cultural studies with archival research to show that great literature is characterized by its radical openness to biographical, political, social, and cultural images, which certain responsive writers adopted and transformed, yielding such symbols as Melville's white whale, Hawthorne's scarlet letter, Poe's raven, and Whitman's grass leaves. Contesting the standard interpretation of America's great writers as marginal figures in a sentimental, proper society, Reynolds reveals that they were instead immersed in a culture that was frequently sensational, subversive, or erotic, epitomized by popular novels about city mysteries, such as the lurid best-seller The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monk Hall by the Philadelphia writer George Lippard.

Family

Reynolds’s wife, whose professional name is Suzanne Nalbantian, is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Long Island University and specializes in the interdisciplinary relationship between literature and neuroscience. Her six books include Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience, The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives, and Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in the Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin.

Awards and honors