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MARTHA
GELLHORN (1908-1998)
Martha Gellhorn is one of the most celebrated war
reporters of the 20th century. She dedicated herself
to journalism in the early 1930s and covered conflicts
from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and Central
America. She was also a novelist and short story
writer.
Martha Gellhorn
was born in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Her father
was George Gellhorn, an eminent gynaecologist. She
studied one year at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania
and then decided to become a journalist and never
graduated. In 1929 she worked for the New Republic
and the Hearst Times Union. In the beginning of
the 1930s, Martha went to Europe to start her career
as a foreign correspondent. She worked in Paris
for various papers, including Vogue, the United
Press, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. During this
period she met her first husband, Bertrand de Jouvenal,
a French political scientist, journalist and aristocrat.
His stepmother was Colette, whom Martha disliked.
Martha Gellhorn
returned to America in 1934. She made her debut
as a novelist with What Mad Pursuit (1934). Harry
Hopkins, Director of Federal Emergency Relief Administration
hired her to report on the Relief programme in industrial
areas. The Trouble I've Seen (1936) was her report
in the form of four short stories. H.G. Wells wrote
its preface. Through her work, she met the President
and Eleanor Roosevelt, who became her lifelong friend.
Gellhorn's second novel, A Stricken Field (1949),
was set in Prague and dealt with European refugees.
In 1941, Gellhorn published a collection of short
stories, The Heart of Another.
In 1936 she
met Ernest Hemmingway in Key West, Florida. She
was twenty-eight, a blond with long legs, an established
writer and ambitious journalist, whose independence
and good looks attracted Hemingway. They met again
in Madrid, where she covered the Spanish civil was
for Collier's Weekly in 1937-38. Next year they
met in Paris. Hemingway was still struggling with
his divorce, but in 1939 they settled in Havana,
Cuba, at the Finca Vigia.
Gellhorn married
Hemingway on November 20, 1939 in Wyoming. Hemingway
dedicated his famous novel about the Spanish Civil
war, For Whom the Bells Toll (1940) to Martha. In
the early 1940s, Hemingway looked for German submarines
in the Caribbean, and Gellhorn covered the start
of World War II in England. In 1942 she joined him
on his boat, the 38-foot Pilar. From 1943 to 1945
Gellhorn reported from England, Italy, France and
Germany. But before the invasion of Normandy in
1944, Hemingway travelled to England as a correspondent,
replacing Gellhorn as Collier's leading correspondent.
Two weeks later she arrived to London and met Hemingway
at the Dorchester Hotel where they had a fierce
argument and from that moment, Gellhorn continued
her life without him. Hemingway had also found another
woman, Mary Welsh, who later became his fourth wife.
Gellhorn and Hemingway divorced in 1945.
In 1949, Martha
adopted a son from an Italian orphanage, Sandy Gellhorn.
Due to problems with his entry to the United States,
Gellhorn resided during the 1950s in Cuernavaca,
Mexico. In 1954 she married T.S. Matthews; they
were divorced in 1963. She travelled to Africa in
1962, a continent she loved and spent much of her
time in Kenya, where she had a house in the Rift
Valley.
Between 1934
and 1967, Gellhorn published six novels. She covered
wars in Vietnam in the 1960s and the Arab-Israeli
conflict of 1967 for the Guardian of London. In
the mid-eighties she reported on the wars in Central
America. At the age of 81, she wrote on the U.S.
invasion of Panama. The View From the Ground (1988)
was a second collection of her non-fiction. She
died in London on 15th February 1998.
Books
by Martha Gellhorn:
- What Mad
Pursuit (1934)
- The Trouble
I've seen (1936)
- A Stricken
Field (1940)
- The Heart
of Another (1941)
- Liana (1944)
- Love Goes
to Press: A Comedy in Three Acts (1947)
- The Wine
of Astonishment (1948) (as Point of No Return
in 1989)
- The Honeyed
Peace: Stories (1953)
- Two by Two
(1958)
- The Face
of War (1959)
- His Own Man
(1961)
- Pretty Tales
for Tired People (1965)
- Vietnam:
A New Kind of War (1966)
- The Lowest
Trees Have Tops (1967)
- Travels with
Myself and Another (1978)
- The Weather
in Africa (1978)
- The View
from the ground (1988)
- The Short
Novels of Martha Gellhorn (1991)
- The Novellas
of Martha Gellhorn (1993)
Books
about Martha Gellhorn:
- Women of
the Word: The Great Foreign Correspondents by
J. Edwards
- Nothing Ever
Happens to the Brave: The Story of Martha Gellhorn
by C. Rollyson
- Women War
Correspondents of World War II by L. Wagner
- Martha Gellhorn
by Caroline Moorehead
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