ABSTRACT
Better known now as a pioneering war correspondent, during her lifetime Martha Gellhorn yearned for personal satisfaction and critical appreciation as a novelist. Gellhorn was born in 1908 in St Louis, Missouri. After studying one year at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, she decided to become a journalist and so never graduated. She worked briefly for the New Republic and the New York-based Times Union but then, in 1930, left the United States on a speculative mission to research and write in Europe, paying for her transatlantic passage by writing an article on the shipping line’s service. In Paris she worked for a number of journals, including Vogue and the St Louis Post-Dispatch, and began a controversial affair with the married journalist and author Bertrand de Jouvenal. She returned to the States, and her first, highly autobiographical, novel What Mad Pursuit (1934) had mixed reviews but her second book, The Trouble I’ve Seen (1936) – based on her reports for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration on how people were surviving the Depression across America – was well received. In all she published six novels between 1934 and 1967. Gellhorn established herself as a war correspondent by filing reports from the Spanish Civil War during 1937-8 for the American magazine Collier’s Weekly. While reporting from Madrid she worked alongside the celebrated American novelist Ernest Hemingway whom she married on 21 November 1940. Hemingway dedicated his famous novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), to Gellhorn – but the marriage was to last just five years. Gellhorn went on to report on World War Two, including the D-Day landings and the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp.1 She later reported from Vietnam in 1966 (for the Guardian) and from the 1967 Arab/Israeli Six-Day War. Her final war assignment – at the age of 81 – was the 1989 invasion of Panama by the US. Collections of Gellhorn’s journalism were compiled as The Face of War (1959) and The View From the Ground (1988). Her sole overtly autobiographical work, and the only piece in which she wrote in the first person, was Travels With Myself and Another (1978), which includes the account of a trip to China in 1941, with Hemingway referred to throughout as ‘UC’ – Gellhorn’s Unwilling Companion. She died on 15 February 1998, aged 89.
