Linda Wagner-Martin is Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She was the 2011 recipient of the Hubbell Medal for lifetime service in American literature (sponsored by the MLA), and has received the Guggenheim fellowship, the senior National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, the Bunting Institute fellowship, and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Philosophical Association and others. She has published more than fifty-five books of criticism, some edited, including Sylvia Plath: A Biography and “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and Her Family, as well as studies of Ernest Hemingway, Zelda Fitzgerald, Barbara Kingsolver, and others.