Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, a Rockefeller awardee, and a resident at Bellagio, Bogliasco, and the Bunting Institute. She recently received the Hubbell Medal for lifetime service to American literature. Her 2013 A History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present is her 53rd book. She has written two other books for this series, one on Ernest Hemingway and the other, in both 1999 and 2003, on Sylvia Plath. She writes widely on twentieth-century American literature, biography, women's writing and pedagogy. Her publications include A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (2000), William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism (2002), Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Hemingway: Eight Decades of Criticism (2009).

Released to coincide with new film 'Ted and Sylvia' starring Gwyneth Paltrow

Additional chapter includes discussion of posthumous publications, recent biographies, the publication of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters and his death, attempts to make previous films

Updated bibliography and chronology

New jacket

Chronology PART I The Writing Life Creating Lives Creating the Persona of the Self Recalling the Bell Jar Lifting the Bell Jar Plath's Hospital Writing Defining Health PART II The Journey Toward Ariel Plath's Poems about Women Plath's Triumphant Woman Poems Getting Rid of Daddy Sylvia Plath, The Poet and Her Writing Life The Usurpation of Sylvia Plath's Narrative: Hughes's Birthday Letters Notes Bibliography (selected), Primary and Secondary Index