Martha Gellhorn

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Martha Gellhorn (8 November 1908 - 15 February 1998) was an American novelist and journalist considered one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. She reported on virtually every major world conflict which took place during her sixty-year career. Gellhorn was also the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945.

1 Early life
2 War in Europe
3 Later career
4 Bibliography
5 External links

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Early life

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Gellhorn graduated from that city's John Burroughs School and enrolled in Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia. In 1927, she left before graduating to pursue a career as a journalist. Her first articles appeared in The New Republic. In 1930, determined to become a foreign correspondent, she went to France for two years where she worked at the United Press bureau in Paris.

While in Europe she became active in the pacifist movement and wrote about her experiences in the book, What Mad Pursuit (1934).

Upon returning to the US, Gellhorn was hired by Harry Hopkins as an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which sent her to report about the impact of the Depression on the United States. Her reports for that agency caught the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the two women became lifelong friends. Her findings were the basis of a novella, The Trouble I've Seen (1936).

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War in Europe

Gellhorn first met Ernest Hemingway during a 1936 Christmas family trip to Key West. They agreed to travel in Spain together to cover the Spanish Civil War, where Gellhorn was hired to report for Collier's Weekly. The pair celebrated Christmas of 1937 together in Barcelona. From Germany, she reported the rise of Adolf Hitler, and in 1938 was in Czechoslovakia. After the outbreak of World War II, she described these events in the novel, A Stricken Field (1940). She later reported the war from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore and Britain. Lacking official press credentials to witness the D-Day landings, she impersonated a stretcher bearer and later recalled, "I followed the war wherever I could reach it." She was the first journalist to report from Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated.

Image:Gellhorn Hemingway.jpg

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Later career

After the war, Gellhorn worked for the Atlantic Monthly, covering the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War in the Middle East and the civil wars in Central America. Aged 81, she travelled impromptu to Panama, where she wrote on the U.S. invasion. Only when the Bosnian war broke out in the 1990s did she concede she was too old to go: "You need to be nimble."

Gellhorn published a large number of books including a collection of articles on war, The Face of War (1959), a novel about McCarthyism, The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1967), an account of her travels (including one trip with Ernest Hemingway), Travels With Myself and Another (1978) and a collection of her peacetime journalism, The View From the Ground (1988).

Gellhorn resented her fame as Hemingway's third wife - he became her second husband in 1940 - remarking that she had no intention of being a footnote in someone else's life. As a condition for granting an interview, at times she insisted that Hemingway's name not be mentioned. She later married T.S. Matthews in 1954; they were divorced in 1963.

During a long working life, Gellhorn reported widely from many international trouble-spots. Gellhorn died in London in 1998 aged 89. Since her death, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism has been established in her honour.

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Bibliography

What Mad Pursuit (1934) her time as a pacifist
The Trouble I've Seen (1936) Depression-era novella
A Stricken Field (1940) novel set in Czechoslovakia at outbreak of war
The Wine of Astonishment (1948) WWII novel, republished in 1989 as Point of No Return
The Face of War (1959) collection of war journalism, updated in 1986
The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1967) collection of travel writing
Travels With Myself and Another (1978) Republished by Eland Books in 1982
"The Weather in Africa" (1984) Eland Books
The View From the Ground (1988) collection of peacetime journalism