Few authors are so well suited to historical study as Whitman, who is widely considered America's greatest poet. This Guide combines contemporary cultural studies and historical scholarship to illuminate Whitman's diverse contexts. The essays explore dimensions of Whitman's dynamic relationship to working-class politics, race and slavery, sexual mores, the visual arts, and the idea of democracy. The poet who emerges from this volume is no "solitary singer," distanced from his culture, but what he himself called "the age transfigured," fully enmeshed in his times and addressing issues...

Few authors are so well suited to historical study as Whitman, who is widely considered America's greatest poet. This Guide combines contemporary cultural studies and historical scholarship to illuminate Whitman's diverse contexts. The essays explore dimensions of Whitman's dynamic relationship to working-class politics, race and slavery, sexual mores, the visual arts, and the idea of democracy. The poet who emerges from this volume is no "solitary singer," distanced from his culture, but what he himself called "the age transfigured," fully enmeshed in his times and addressing issues...

As featured in AMC's Breaking Bad, given by Gale Boetticher to Walter White and discovered by Hank Schrader.
"I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease....observing a spear of summer grass."
So begins Leaves of Grass, the first great American poem and indeed, to this day, the greatest and most essentially American poem in all our national literature.
The publication of Leaves of Grass in July 1855 was a landmark event in literary history....

America's best-selling novel in its time, The Quaker City, published in 1845, is a sensational expose of social corruption, personal debauchery and the sexual exploitation of women in antebellum Philadelphia. This new edition, with an introduction by David S. Reynolds, brings back into print this important work by George Lippard (1822-1854), a journalist, freethinker and labour and social reformer.

From the great events of the day to the patient workings of a spider, few poets responded to the life around them as powerfully as Walt Whitman. Now, in this brief but bountiful volume, David S. Reynolds offers a wealth of insight into the life and work of Whitman, examining the author through the lens of nineteenth-century America.
Reynolds shows how Whitman responded to contemporary theater, music, painting, photography, science, religion, and sex. But perhaps nothing influenced Whitman more than the political events of his lifetime, as the struggle over slavery threatened to rip apart...

Waking Giant is a brilliant, definitive history of America's vibrant and tumultuous rise during the Jacksonian era from David S. Reynolds, the Bancroft Prize-winning author of Walt Whitman's America. Casting fresh light on Andrew Jackson, who redefined the presidency, along with John Quincy Adams and James K. Polk, who expanded the nation's territory and strengthened its position internationally, Reynolds captures the turbulence of a democracy caught in the throes of the controversy over slavery, the rise of capitalism, and the birth of urbanization.

The award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance. With its combination of sharp critical insight, engaging observation, and narrative drive, it represents the kind of masterful cultural history for which David Reynolds is known. Here the major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson receive striking, original readings set against the rich backdrop of...

When Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852 it caused a sensation. Its antislavery position proved to be one the most powerful cultural influences behind the Civil War. By emphasizing the moral failure inherent in slavery, it helped intensify the conflict between north and south. By the end of the year it had sold over 300,000 copies in the U.S. and more than a million abroad. It went on to be the nineteenth century's worldwide bestseller.

To capitalize on the book's success the publisher released a lavishly illustrated gift version for the Christmas season. Widely known as the...

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. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel s afterlife including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations. "

Lincoln's Selected Writings includes a rich selection of his public and private letters, speeches, eulogies, proposals, debate transcriptions, addresses (including the First and Second Inaugurals), and more. The texts are accompanied by explanatory annotations, a detailed preface, a note on the texts, and a list of abbreviations. Lincoln's writings are followed by contemporary responses to him in poems, songs, and articles; representations of Lincoln in modern imaginative and nonfiction writing; and selections from recent cross-disciplinary studies of Lincoln--including discussions...