David S. Reynolds

In his poetry, Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America, and in so doing, heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it....

Now an Apple TV+ documentary, Lincoln's Dilemma, airing February 18, 2022. One of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year | A Washington Post Notable Book | A Christian Science Monitor and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020 Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Abraham Lincoln Prize and...

Few historical figures are as intriguing as John Brown, the controversial Abolitionist who used terrorist tactics against slavery and single-handedly changed the course of American history. This brilliant biography of Brown (1800—1859) by the prize-winning critic and cultural biographer David...

In Waking Giant, award-winning historian David S. Reynolds illuminates the era's exciting political story alongside the fascinating social and cultural movements that influenced it....

A revelatory history of American division through the prism of two ships, whose widespread use to define that division has been lost to memory despite their enduring legacy In the bitterly polarized decades leading up to the American Civil War, it was commonplace to argue that America’s strife...

A magisterial work of criticism and cultural history, Beneath the American Renaissance will fascinate anyone interested in the genesis of America’s most significant literary epoch and the iconic figures who defined it....

In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American....