David S. Reynolds

David S. Reynolds (born 1948) is an American literary critic, biographer, and historian who has written about American literature and culture. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, on the Civil War era—including figures such as Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Lippard, and John Brown. Reynolds has been awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, the Christian Gauss Award, the Ambassador Book Award, the Gustavus Myers Book Award, the John Hope Franklin Prize (Honorable Mention), and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a regular reviewer for The New York Times Book Review.