David S. Reynolds Quote

The inundation of the average American’s consciousness with profit-driven spectacles and images would not come until after the Civil War. Before the war, Americans attended to oratory with a seriousness and eagerness that would be frittered away with the advent of show business, a term introduced in 1850 but not widely used until the late sixties.

David S. Reynolds

The inundation of the average American’s consciousness with profit-driven spectacles and images would not come until after the Civil War. Before the war, Americans attended to oratory with a seriousness and eagerness that would be frittered away with the advent of show business, a term introduced in 1850 but not widely used until the late sixties.

Related Quotes

About 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 Review of Books..