Reynolds was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on August 30, 1948, and was raised in nearby Barrington, located near Narragansett Bay. He lived there for over a decade in a home attached to an old lighthouse on Nayatt Point before moving on to further his education.

Reynolds first attended Amherst College, where he received a B. A. in 1970 and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was awarded his Ph.D. nine years later. He spent the next decade teaching English and American Studies at, successively, Northwestern University, Barnard College, New York University and Rutgers University at Camden. In 1989, Reynolds moved to the City University of New York and has taught there ever since. At first he did so at Baruch College and now as a Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the Ph.D. Program in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His wife, whose professional name is Suzanne Nalbantian, is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University.

A few of his books, such as Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, have won awards, including the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. He was also finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

• Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson [1]

• John Brown Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights [2]

• Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography [3]

• Walt Whitman [4]

• Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville

• Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America

He was also the editor for:

• A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman [5]

• Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 150th Anniversary Edition [6]

• George Lippard,Prophet of Protest: Writings of an American Radical, 1822—1854

• The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monk Hall, by George Lippard

• Venus in Boston and Other Tales of 19th Century City Life, by George Thompson (coedited with Kimberly Gladman)

• The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature (coedited with Debra J. Rosenthal)