[2] He began studying at Stanford University in the summer of 1944 but in June 1945, enlisted for military service and entered the U.S. Navy in San Diego as a hospital apprentice.
He was the recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship from Columbia, and spent the following year on a trip through Europe and the Middle East during which time he wrote freelance newspaper articles.
[11][12] In 1971, Reinhardt published a novel set during the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish war that led to the formation of the modern Turkish Republic, which he had been working on since his 1957 Ford Foundation fellowship.
The Ashes of Smyrna, published by Harper & Row in the U.S. and subsequently in the United Kingdom, Greece, and Turkey, received positive notices, including a review by British historian and author Mary Renault, who said "Reinhardt presents with a Goya-like ruthlessness, humanity and precision the disasters of war and their dreadful expense of spirit: a war, too, which should not be forgotten by anyone who wants to understand modern Greece.
[15] In subsequent years, he was occupied with completing two books for friends who died leaving unfinished manuscripts: The Last Grand Adventure by William Bronson, about the Klondike gold rush in the 1890s; and San Francisco: As It Is, As It Was, with Paul C. Johnson, a collection of historic photographs of the city paired with contemporary shots of the same locations,[16] some of which were taken by his oldest son, Kurt.
Wolman, an amateur pilot and former chief photographer for Rolling Stone magazine, shot the aerial images from his private plane and Reinhardt wrote the accompanying text.
He helped direct the non-fiction program with award-winning San Francisco Chronicle science writer David Perlman from 1991 to 2001.