Linda Wagner-Martin was awarded the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Service to American Literature in 2011. She has published more than sixty books about American writers, including influential literary biographies on Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and others. She taught at Wayne State University, Michigan State University, and The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. 

In the Literary Lives series, she has published works on Ernest Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison.