David S. Reynolds is the author of the prize-winning books John Brown,
Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and
Seeded Civil Rights; Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography; and
Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of
Emerson and Melville, as well as many other books and articles. His book
Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson will be published by
HarperCollins in October 2008. He is Distinguished Professor of English
and American Studies at the Ph.D. Program in English at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. He is listed in Who's Who in
America and Who's Who in the World. Professor Reynolds is one
of a tiny
handful of CUNY's 6,100 professors chosen to represent CUNY in its "Look
Who's Teaching Here" ad campaign, featured in New York's subways, buses,
and newspapers. He spends summers and year-round weekends in Sagaponack
with his wife Suzanne. Their daughter, Aline Reynolds, who in 2007
graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College, works in Manhattan and on
Long Island.
Born in Rhode Island on August 30, 1948, David Reynolds was raised by Narragansett Bay in Barrington, where he lived in a home attached to an old lighthouse on Nayatt Point. Attracted to reading and writing from an early age, Reynolds majored in English at Amherst College, where he studied with Professors Leo Marx, Benjamin DeMott, and others. After graduating Amherst in 1970, he taught high-school English briefly at the Providence Country Day School and then went for the doctorate in English at the University of California, Berkeley. Among the professors he worked with at Berkeley were Henry Nash Smith, Larzer Ziff, Henry F. May, and Richard Bridgman. He was awarded the Ph.D. in 1979 and spent the next decade teaching English and American Studies at, successively, Northwestern University, Barnard College, New York University, and Rutgers University at Camden. In 1989 he moved to the City University of New York. Reynolds' most celebrated books, John Brown, Abolitionist, Walt Whitman's America, and Beneath the American Renaissance explore the cultural, political, and social backgrounds of major nineteenth-century Americans. John Brown, Abolitionist (Knopf 2005; Vintage 2006) defends this violent antislavery activist against the usual charges of insanity and terrorism by pointing out his progressive racial views and his worthy intention of eradicating slavery, a system of oppression, murder, rape, and torture. This book is the winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award in human rights; the winner of the Kansas State Book Award; a finalist for the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship; listed among "The Outstanding Books of 2005" by the National Book Critics Circle; listed among "Top Picks" of "Notable Books of 2005" by American Library Association; and noted as "the most widely reviewed book in America in major periodicals" for a period in April and May, 2005 by a book-trade magazine. Walt Whitman's America (Knopf 1995; Vintage paperback 1996) is both a biography of America's greatest poet and a wide-ranging history of America in the nineteenth-century. Whitman was interested in just about everything, and Reynolds uses his life and writings as windows on many aspects of American life, including sexual mores, racial issues, women's rights, slavery, homosexuality, Manhattan street life, early Brooklyn and Long Island, painting, theater, photography, religion and science, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Widely hailed in more than 40 newspapers and magazines throughout the nation, Walt Whitman's America is a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the History Book Club, Readers Subscription, and the Quality Paperback Book Club. Walt Whitman's America was awarded the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American history. It also won the Ambassador Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. It was selected as a "Notable Book of the Year" by The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Choice, and the American Library Association. Reynolds has given many readings of the book throughout the country and has been interviewed on the C-SPAN show "Book Notes" as well as on National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation". He was featured as well in special articles in The New York Times Book Review, Time, The East Hampton Star, Dan's Papers, and The Southampton Press. Beneath the American Renaissance (Knopf 1988; Harvard U. Press paperback 1989) shows how seven authors--Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and Emily Dickinson--adopted themes and images from their contemporary popular culture. This book won the Christian Gauss Award for excellence in criticism and was selected as a "Notable Book of the Year" by the New York Times Book Review. It also won Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Award. Reynolds' other books include Walt Whitman (Oxford 2003); Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Harvard 1981); George Lippard (G. K. Hall 1982); Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass": 150th Anniversary Edition (Oxford, 2005; a facsimile edition of the famous 1855 edition of Whitman's poems); George Lippard, Prophet of Protest (Peter Lang, 1988; a collection of Lippard's writings); George Thompson's "Venus in Boston" and Other Tales of Nineteenth-Century City Life (Univ. of Mass. Press, 2002; coedited with Kimberly Gladman); George Lippard's "The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall" (Univ. of Mass. Press 1995); and The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance and American Literature (Univ. of Mass. Press; coedited with Deborah Rosenthal). Reynolds is a regular reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. He has lectured throughout the world on American literature and culture. He is now at work on a book on Harriet Beecher Stowe, to be published by Princeton University Press. His wife, whose professional name is Suzanne Nalbantian, is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. She is the author of several books published by Palgrave/Macmillan, including Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience, Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Anais Nin , Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel, and The Symbol of the Soul from Holderlin to Yeats. She has also edited a volume of essays on Anais Nin's literary art. A path-blazing scholar in linkages between the humanities and hard science, she has lectured at many universities and laboratories world-wide, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Indiana, Collège de France, University of Wuerzburg, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Max-Planck Institute in Germany, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Suzanne was raised in Manhattan and comes from a literary family: her mother, the late Anna Balakian, was a renowned expert on surrealism and comparative literature who was Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at New York University; her aunt, Nona Balakian, was an editor at The New York Times Book Review. David and Suzanne feel lucky to be able to spend part of the year in their Sagaponack home, which is on Daniels Lane. To relax, David Reynolds plays tennis, guitar, and popular piano (his hobby is songwriting, and he earned his way through graduate school by playing music professionally). The Reynolds spend their winters in Old Westbury. David S. Reynolds:
summer address: Box 209, Sagaponack, NY 11962 (tel. 516-537-1648) Web Links for David S. Reynolds:
David Reynolds interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air:
David Reynolds interviewed on Paula Gordon Show:
David Reynolds interviewed on Book Notes with Brian Lamb:
David Reynolds interviewed on Leonard Lopate Show: |
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