He is the author or editor of fifteen books,[1] 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.

He was influenced by the "representative men" theory of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who writes, "the ideas of the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it… We learn of our contemporaries what they know without effort, and almost through the pores of our skin.

Instead, Reynolds shows, Lincoln learned a lot from a rich, teeming cultural environment that he absorbed and rechanneled in his brilliant presidency and his immortal speeches.

Contesting the standard interpretation of America's great writers as marginal figures in a sentimental, proper society, Reynolds reveals that they were instead immersed in a culture that was frequently sensational, subversive, or erotic, epitomized by popular novels about city mysteries, such as the lurid best-seller The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monk Hall by the Philadelphia writer George Lippard (the subject of two other books[7] by Reynolds).

Her eight books include Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience, The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives (coedited with Paul M. Matthews and James B. McClelland), Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in the Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin, and Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal (coedited with Paul M. Matthews).