JOHN BROWN, ABOLITIONIST: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights
David S. Reynolds, Author . Knopf $30 (592p) ISBN 978-0-375-41188-5
In the very first paragraphs of this biography, Bancroft Prize–winner Reynolds (Walt Whitman's America
) steps back a bit from the grandiose claims of his subtitle. Nevertheless, his book as a whole paints a positive portrait of the...
READ FULL REVIEW
David S. Reynolds, Author . Harper $29.95 (466p) ISBN 978-0-06-082656-7
Bancroft Prize–winning historian Reynolds (Walt Whitman's America
) offers a fine addition to the literature on pre–Civil War American history in this account of the years 1815–1848. Exhilarated after defying Britain in the...
READ FULL REVIEW
David S. Reynolds, Author Vintage Books USA $22 (704p) ISBN 978-0-679-76709-1
Literary historian Reynolds's biography of Whitman examines the poet within the broader social and cultural context of 19th-century America. (Mar.)
READ FULL REVIEW
David S. Reynolds, Author Alfred A. Knopf $40 (625p) ISBN 978-0-394-54448-9
Poe's portraits of psychopathic murderers, Melville's studies of incest and deceit, Whitman's hymns to sexual passion and Hawthorne's allegories of social outcasts had roots in the popular writings of their daypenny newspapers, crime pamphlets,...
READ FULL REVIEW
David S. Reynolds, Author Alfred A. Knopf $35 (671p) ISBN 978-0-394-58023-4
Poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), raised by a blunt, taciturn father who failed as a housebuilder and by a penny-pinching, barely literate mother, identified with working-class culture as he pursued a job-hopping, insecure career as printer,...
READ FULL REVIEW
David S. Reynolds. Norton, $27.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-393-08132-9
In 1868, a writer in the Nation coined the phrase "the great American novel" to describe Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1851 Uncle Tom's Cabin. Distinguished historian Reynolds (Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson) does his best to support this...
READ FULL REVIEW
