Linda Wagner-Martin

Linda Wagner-Martin regularly teaches seminars in American modernism, postmodernism and ethnic studies; issues of the canon, and Faulkner. Her special interests are twentieth century literatures, women's writing, biography, poetry, and such authors as Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, and the Beat writers. Currently Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English, Wagner-Martin taught for more than twenty years at Michigan State University.

She has won teaching awards at both that university and UNC; and has been a sponsor of many women's groups on both campuses. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Bunting Institute fellow, a senior National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, and (twice) a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. She has been president of a number of professional groups, including the American literature division of the Modern Language Association and, currently, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation.

Among her fifty edited and written books are biographies of Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Ellen Glasgow, Barbara Kingsolver, and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald; The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States and its accompanying anthology (with Cathy N. Davidson); Telling Women's Lives, The New Biography; and The Modern American Novel, 1914-1945 followed by The Mid-Century American Novel, 1935-65. Among recent books are The Portable Edith Wharton and William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism. She is presently completing a study of the 1930s in American literature.