Linda C. Wagner-Martin

Background

Linda Wagner-Martin was born on August 18, 1936, in the United States.

Education

In 1963, Linda and an African American man were the first two individuals to earn a PhD from Bowling Green State University.

Career

Linda started her career with teaching English and Drama in high schools in Ohio and Michigan. For the last 23 years, Linda Wagner-Martin has been the Frank Borden and Barbara Lasater Hanes Distinguished Professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill. She came to Chapel Hill from Michigan State University, where she had served as Chair of the English Department and as an Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Letters. On June 30th, 2011, Linda retired.

Linda has written and edited books or published essays and articles on anybody who was somebody in the 20th-century American canon, including William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ellen Glasgow, Sylvia Plath, Lillian Hellman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Smith, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood.

Achievements

• Linda Wagner-Martin is well known as a biographer of twentieth-century American poet Sylvia Plath.

Works

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• book

  • Hemingway's Wars: Public and Private Battles 2017
  • Sylvia Plath: A Biography 1987
  • Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (Literary Lives) 2003
  • Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: A Reference Guide (Greenwood Guides to Literature) 2003
  • Maya Angelou: Adventurous Spirit 2015
  • Toni Morrison and the Maternal: From «The Bluest Eye» to «Home» (Modern American Literature) 2014
  • Telling Women's Lives: The New Biography 1996
  • Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family 1997
  • A History of American Literature: 1950 to the Present 2013
  • Emily Dickinson: A Literary Life (Literary Lives) 2013

Membership

• Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature

• Ellen Glasgow Society

• Society for the Study of Narrative Technique

• American Literature Section of the MLA

Connections

Linda is the mother of three children.