David S. Reynolds

David S. Reynolds is Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights, winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award; winner of the Kansas State Book Award; 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 the period of April 19-May 5, 2005 by Publishers’ Lunch. His other books include Walt Whitman and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass the 150th Anniversary Edition. His earlier books include Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the coveted Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (winner of the prestigious Christian Gauss Award and Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize), George Lippard, and Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America. He is the editor of George Lippard, Prophet of Protest: Writings of an American Radical and the coeditor of The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature and of an edition of three works by the popular nineteenth-century novelist George Thompson. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review. He received a B.A. magna cum laude from Amherst College and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is at work on a book on the politics and culture of Jacksonian America, to be published by HarperCollins. Distinguished Professor Reynolds is one of a handful of professors chosen to represent CUNY in its “Look Who’s Teaching Here” ad campaign, featured in New York’s subways, buses, posters, and newspapers. Professor Reynolds is included in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World. He was born and raised in Rhode Island and currently lives on Long Island with his wife, Suzanne Nalbantian, a professor of comparative literature at Long Island University. Their daughter, Aline Reynolds, recently graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College.