Background

Ethnicity: Gellhorn's German-born father and maternal grandfather were Jewish.

Martha Ellis Gellhorn was born on November 8, 1908, in Saint Louis, Missouri, United States. She was the daughter of Edna Fischel Gellhorn, a suffragist, and George Gellhorn, a gynecologist. Martha had three other siblings who were all boys - George Gellhorn Jr., Fischel Gellhorn and Alfred Gellhorn.

Education

Gellhorn graduated from John Burroughs School in 1926. She then attended Bryn Mawr College and left it in 1927, without having graduated, to pursue a career of a journalist.

Career

Gellhorn began her journalism career writing for the New Republic in 1927. She soon moved to Paris, working for various publications and joining the United Press Bureau, where she sought to become a foreign correspondent. While there, she aligned herself with the pacifist movement and wrote a book about her experiences in a novel, What Mad Pursuit (1934).

When Gellhorn returned to the United States, as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, she travelled throughout the United States chronicling the effects of the Great Depression on everyday people. Her coverage of the topic is detailed in her book The Trouble I’ve Seen, published in 1936. A year later, Gellhorn joined the staff of Collier’s Weekly to cover the Spanish Civil War.

As a war correspondent with Collier’s, Gellhorn soon went to Western Europe to cover World War II, and in 1944 she allegedly stowed away on a hospital ship to report on the D-Day landings. The next year, she entered Dachau with American troops for the liberation of the infamous concentration camp, and her harrowing account was a landmark piece of journalism.

In 1966 she joined London’s Guardian, for which she reported on the Vietnam conflict and Arab-Israeli wars. She also covered the Adolf Eichmann Nazi war crimes trial for the Atlantic Monthly. In the 1980s she continued to travel extensively, writing about the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the U.S. invasion of Panama, and in the mid-1990s she went to Brazil to write about street children there. That would be her last significant article before her death, as, dying of cancer, she took her own life in 1998.

Gellhorn wrote several novels in addition to her wartime efforts. The novels included A Stricken Field , published in 1939, about refugees in Prague just before the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Liana , from 1944, about a rich white man and mulatto woman marrying in the French Caribbean. In the 1950s, when she retreated somewhat from the war correspondent's life, seeking mental calm, she wrote the novels The Honeyed Peace and Two by Two. Critics sometimes suggested that she had a stronger command of novellas, as in the collections The Weather in Africa from 1988 and The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn in 1993. Her memoir, Travels With Myself and Another was published in 1978.

Achievements

• Gellhorn was one of the first—and most widely read—female war correspondents of the twentieth century, who covered every war that occurred across the globe over a period extending nearly 60 years. In 1958 Gellhorn was honored with the O. Henry Award.
  
  The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was established in 1999 in her honor.
  
  

Works

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• book

  • Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

    (The first collected letters of this defining figure of th...)

    2006
  • The Short Novels

    (A collection of tales of people living with enthusiasm, r...)

    1991
  • Love Goes to Press

    (A Comedy in Three Acts; In this romantic farce, set in a ...)

    1946
  • The Weather in Africa

    (Two sisters, a refugee from a German prisoner-of-war camp...)

    1980
  • The Face of War

    (A collection of “first-rate frontline journalism” from th...)

    1959
  • The View from the Ground

    (An anthology spanning six decades of on-the-scene journal...)

    1988
  • A Stricken Field

    (A convincing account of a people under the brutal oppress...)

    1940
  • The Trouble I've Seen

    (These four interlinked stories encapsulate Martha Gellhor...)

    1936
  • Point of No Return

    (A United States soldier confronts the horrors of the Holo...)

    1989
  • Travels with Myself and Another 1978
  • The Lowest Trees Have Tops 1969

Politics

From the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the Central American wars of the mid-eighties, Gellhorn’s candid reporting reflected her deep empathy for people regardless of their political ideology. Like many writers and artists of her generation, including Hemingway, Gellhorn sympathized passionately with the democratically elected socialist government of Spain in its fight against the fascist generals led by Francisco Franco. When the Spanish fascists won the war in 1939, she was crushed. "Nothing in my life has so affected my thinking as the losing of that war," she wrote in a letter to her friend Hortense Flexner, according to Weingarten. "It is, very banally, like the death of all loved things." The author openly protested the Vietnam war, which she found supremely disturbing and horrific, full of victims on both sides of the battles lines. The South Vietnamese government even banned her from returning there, sending her into a long depression.

Views

Gellhorn criticized most war journalism as too trusting of generals and governments. For Gellhorn and her peers, such as British journalist George Orwell, "the idea was never to just see the show or get the story," wrote Susie Linfield in the Nation. They believed, Linfield explained, that "journalism equaled truth, and that truth would inspire people (especially those in the supposedly civilized democracies) to protest, to intervene." A reporter's job, Gellhorn once said, according to the Chicago Tribune , was simply to "to limit yourself to what you see or hear and not suppress or invent." But her critics charged she broke her own rules to fit her political convictions.

Quotations: "Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it."

"It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination."

"Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit."

"In Barcelona, it was perfect bombing weather. The cafes along the Ramblas were crowded. There was nothing much to drink; a sweet fizzy poison called orangeade and a horrible liquid supposed to be sherry. There was, of course, nothing to eat. Everyone was out enjoying the cold afternoon sunlight. No bombers had come over for at least two hours."

"I was a writer before I met him and I have been a writer for 45 years since." (about Hemingway)

"People cannot survive our bombs. We are uprooting the people from the lovely land where they have lived for generations; and the uprooted are given not bread but stone. Is this an honorable way for a great nation to fight a war 8,000 miles from its safe homeland?" (about the Vietnam War)

"I tell you loneliness is the thing to master. Courage and fear, love, death are only parts of it and can easily be ruled afterwards. If I make myself master my own loneliness there will be peace or safety: and perhaps these are the same."

"The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice."

"War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination."

"Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival."

"If I practised sex out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it ... seemed a defeat. I accompanied men and was accompanied in action, in the extrovert part of life; I plunged into that ... but not sex; that seemed to be their delight, and all I got was a pleasure of being wanted, I suppose, and the tenderness (not nearly enough) that a man gives when he is satisfied. I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents."

Personality

Martha Gellhorn was a fearless and an ambitious blonde with big ideas about people, politics and polemics. She had a quick wit and was a woman way ahead of her time, reporting every war scene that occurred in her eventful 60 years of life. She traveled the world extensively to more than 50 countries and was known to go to extreme lengths to get a story even if it involved stowing away on a boat or smuggling herself into enemy territory. She thwarted the patriarchal society by becoming one of the most celebrated novelists of all times.

Physical Characteristics: Towards the end of her life, she was almost blind and suffered from ovarian and liver cancer.

Connections

Gellhorn's first major affair was with the French economist Bertrand de Jouvenel. It began in 1930, when she was 22 years old, and lasted until 1934. She would have married de Jouvenel if his wife had consented to a divorce.

In 1940 Gellhorn married writer Ernest Hemingway, whom she had met years earlier in Key West, Florida, and again in Spain. The marriage was difficult. He wanted her to be a deferential wife; she wanted to live life like he did. Both had terrible tempers. "Ernest and I really are afraid of each other, each one knowing that the other is the most violent person either one knows," she wrote to Flexner, as quoted by Weingarten. While married to Hemingway, Gellhorn had an affair with James M. Gavin. The couple divorced in 1945. After their ugly divorce, she refused for his name to be mentioned in any interview. She reasoned that she didn’t just want to be a “footnote in someone else’s life” hence, her dislike for the mention of his name to be associated with hers.

Between marriages after divorcing Hemingway in 1945, Martha had romantic connections with an American businessman, (1945) Laurance Rockefeller; journalist William Walton (1947); and David Gurewitsch (1950), a medical doctor.

In 1949, Gellhorn adopted a boy, Sandy, from an Italian orphanage. In 1954, she married the former managing editor of Time Magazine, T. S. Matthews. The couple divorced in 1963.

Father:

George Gellhorn

Doctor George Gellhorn, a gynecologist, was born in Wroclaw, Poland and immigrated to America in 1900 with his parents Adolph Gellhorn and Rosalie Gellhorn.

Mother:

Edna Fischel Gellhorn

Edna Fischel Gellhorn was a suffragist. She was a big advocate of women’s voting rights. She was an officer of the Equal Suffrage Leagues and took part in activities that relate to this. She also became the first vice president of the National League of Women Votes. She is included in the league’s state and national rolls of honor. Before her death, she was chosen as the Woman of Achievement by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

adopted son:

Sandy Gellhorn

Sandy Gellhorn came from an Italian orphanage. Sandy took the family name Matthew when Martha married T.S. Matthews.

Brother:

George Gellhorn Jr.

(December 24, 1904 - September 18, 1968)

Brother:

Walter Fischel Gellhorn

Walter Fischel Gellhorn was born on September 18, 1906. He was a law scholar and a professor before his death on December 11, 1995.

Brother:

Alfred Gellhorn

Dr. Alfred Gellhorn was born on June 4, 1913. He was an oncologist before he died on March 24, 2008.

Ex-husband:

T. S. Matthews

Thomas Stanley "T. S." Matthews (January 16, 1901 – January 4, 1991) was an American magazine editor, journalist, and author. He served as editor of Time magazine from 1949 to 1953.

Ex-husband:

Ernest Hemingway

Partner:

Bertrand de Jouvenel

Bertrand de Jouvenel des Ursins (31 October 1903 – 1 March 1987) was a French philosopher, political economist, and futurist.

References

• Gellhorn Drawn from extensive interviews and exclusive access to Gellhorn's papers and correspondence, this seminal biography spans half the globe and almost an entire century to offer an exhilarating, intimate portrait of one of the defining women of our times.
  2004
• Hemingway and Gellhorn: The Untold Story of Two Writers, Espionage, War, and the Great Depression The book tells the story of Hemingway’s tumultuous marriage to his third wife set against the backdrop of the Great Depression in Key West, the first revolution in Cuba, the Spanish civil war, World War II, and the war in China.
  2011
• Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn This controversial and acclaimed biography portrays a vibrant and troubled woman who never tired of fighting for causes she considered just.
  2016
• Martha Gellhorn: Myth, Motif and Remembrance This study is a fresh take on the Gellhorn legacy and a look at the basic values, themes and motifs which permeated all of her writing.
  2015
• Hemingway & Gellhorn It was a romance born out of war...and later torn apart by it. This powerful drama recounts one of the great love stories of the 20th century: the relationship between literary giant Ernest Hemingway and trailblazing war correspondent Martha Gellhorn.
  2012