David S. Reynolds

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.”[2] 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.”[3] 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.

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,”[4] 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.

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 (the subject of two other books[5] by Reynolds).

• Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times.
• Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America.
• Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.
• John Brown Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights.
• Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography.
• Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville.
• Walt Whitman.
• George Lippard.
• Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America.

• Lincoln's Selected Writings: A Norton Critical Edition.
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly [The Splendid Edition], by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
• A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman.
• Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 150th Anniversary Edition.
• George Lippard, Prophet of Protest: Writings of an American Radical, 1822–1854.
• The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monk Hall, by George Lippard.
• Venus in Boston and Other Tales of 19th Century City Life, by George Thompson (coedited with Kimberly Gladman).
• The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature (coedited with Debra J. Rosenthal).

• Above the American Renaissance: David S. Reynolds and the Spiritual Imagination in American Literary Studies. Edited by Harold K. Bush and Brian Yothers.