Martha Gellhorn was a journalist, novelist and travel writer, most noted for her reporting of some of the biggest wars and major conflicts of the 20th century. One of the first female war correspondents, she found herself drawn to tense terrain and compelled to communicate the horrors of war to the civilized world. She was notorious for finding a way to be in places where women of her time were not welcome or even expected.
Although Gellhorn published five novels, fourteen novellas and two collections of short stories, she is best known for her reporting which is said to have brought a fresh approach to war journalism. Her narration of the impact of war on ordinary people around the world is what set her work apart from her peers. She was so committed to reporting the wars around her that it was finally only old age that stopped her.
She is often remembered as the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, a characterization she resented and discouraged. In her later years, after the Vietnam War, she became increasingly critical of war journalism of the time. She claimed that people were not getting the full story, instead sugarcoated versions that supported the generals and governments. She spent the last years of her life in an apartment in London.
Childhood & Early Life
- Martha Gellhorn was born on November 8, 1908, in St Louis, Missouri, USA. Her mother, Edna Gellhorn, was an American suffragist who played an important role in the founding of the National League of Women Voters. Her father was George Gellhorn, a German-born Jewish gynaecologist.
- She was very close to her mother and looked up to her. She often accompanied her mother for rallies and protests, participating in one from as young as 8-years-old.
- After a short period in a convent school, she attended John Burroughs School, a progressive private school founded by her parents. She later went to Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia, however, left it in 1927 without graduating, pulled by her desire to become a journalist.
Career
- She started her career in journalism with The New Republic, and spent some time reporting crime for a local newspaper. Her determination to become a foreign correspondent took her to France in 1930, where she worked at the Paris bureau of the United Press.
- Two years later, she returned to the US and was hired by Harry Hopkins, a senior official in President Franklin D Roosevelt’s administration. She travelled the length and breadth of the country to document how the Great Depression was affecting the everyday lives of people, particularly the hungry, poor and homeless. She turned her research into a collection of short stories, The Trouble I’ve Seen, published in 1936.
- In 1937, she went to Spain and reported on the Spanish Civil War, the first war she reported. This was followed by her reports from Germany on the rise of Adolf Hitler.
- Gellhorn reported the Second World War from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore and England. She describes events from the war in her novel A Stricken Field, published in 1940. Her war reports, which focused on ordinary soldiers and civilians, were compiled in a collection, The Face of War, published in 1959.
- Having travelled all over the world, she narrated her experiences in Travels with Myself and Another, published in 1978. Peppered with humorous anecdotes of uncomfortable adventures from various corners of the world, the account soon became a highly regarded travel book.
- She continued working even in her 70s, covering the civil wars in Central America. By the time she was 80, she was slowed down by poor sight and fragile health. Yet, at 81, she reported about the civilian casualties in the slums of Panama as a result of the US invasion.
- Gellhorn finally retired from journalism at the start of the 1990s, declaring that she was too old to cover the Balkan conflicts. Her last foreign reporting trip was to Brazil in 1995, from where she wrote about the poverty and violence against the street people.
Major Works
- Her reports from across America during the Great Depression became part of the official government files.
- Gellhorn did not have the official press credentials to report on the Normandy landings so she hid in a hospital ship to get there. She became the only woman to be at Normandy on D-Day on June 6, 1944.
- She was one of the first journalists to report from the Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated by US troops on April 29, 1945. It became one of the most famous accounts of the discovery of the camps.
Awards & Achievements
- The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after her. Established in 1999, it is annually awarded to reporting that is similar to her work.
- She was among five 20th-century journalists to be honoured by the United States Postal with first-class rate postage stamps which were issued on April 22, 2008.
- A 2011 documentary film, No Job for a Woman: The Women Who Fought to Report WWII features Gellhorn and talks about how she changed the way war reporting is done.
- In 2019, a blue English Heritage plaque was unveiled at her former London home, the first of its kind dedicated to a war correspondent.
Personal Life
- In 1933, she married Bertrand de Jouvenet, a French pacifist, which ended in divorce. She was married to American novelist Ernest Hemingway from 1940 to 1945. In 1954, she married TS Matthews, the former managing editor of Time Magazine. After that too ended in divorce in 1963, she said she found married life too boring.
- An unsuccessful cataract operation in 1992 left her with diminished eyesight. She suffered from ovarian and liver cancer in her last years. Gellhorn chose to end her life by swallowing a cyanide pill on February 15, 1998, in London.
Trivia
- During her reporting of the Great Depression, she befriended First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who invited her to live at the White House. She also helped the First Lady with her column in an American monthly magazine for women.
- Owing to her experience living at the White House, President John F Kennedy is said to have asked her if she knew a way to sneak out of the White House. She called the president ‘darling’ while replying.
