Martha Gellhorn gave war journalism a new direction with her courageous activities, expertise in literature, and empathic nature. One of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century, Gellhorn was also an accomplished fiction writer with 5 novels, 14 novellas, and 2 collections of short stories in her credit. Her passion for foreign correspondence drove her to travel around the globe and most of her writings were based on people and incidents she encountered during her brief travels.

The American novelist, travel writer, and journalist had a dignified and impressive writing career. The 60 years-long career covered a dozen of major world conflicts and issues from World War II to the poverty in Brazil. Her novels and stories mainly described the effect of war on the common people and the footnote soldiers. This made her an ideal character among the young journalists. Some of her great creations are ‘What Mad Pursuit’, ‘The View From the Ground’, etc. She married celebrity writer Ernest Hemingway and though not a practitioner of feminism, she had much concern about her special personality, and the relationship didn’t last for long. Due to her extraordinary contribution to journalism, the ‘Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism’ was established in her honor.

Childhood & Early Life

• Gellhorn was born on November 8, 1908, in St. Louis, Missouri in a family of learned and liberal-minded people. She was the daughter of George Gellhorn, a German-born gynecologist, and Edna Fischel Gellhorn, a suffragist who was fighting for women’s right for voting. She had two siblings Walter Gellhorn and Alfred Gellhorn.  Like her parents, her brothers, also held respectable positions in their own fields. Walter was a renowned law professor at ‘Columbia University’ and Alfred was the dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
• During her childhood, Her took part in various rallies and events with her mother. In 1916, during Democratic Party’s national convention in St. Louis, 7-year-old Gellhorn and another little girl joined a rally for women’s right to vote, ‘The Golden Lane’ where they represented the future women voters of the US.
• Martha Gellhorn took admission to a convent school but soon her father took her out of that school. He did so when he saw that the pictures of female anatomy in the book were covered and realized that the teachers were not doing justice to education . Then she joined a progressive private school founded by her parents and later graduated from John Burroughs School in St. Louis in 1926.
• She enrolled in ‘Bryn Mawr College’ and switched the major from English to French. This was a good choice for her journalism career. But soon she left the college and started her journalism career with ‘The New Republic’. In 1927, Martha Gellhorn’s first article was published in ‘The New Republic’. Then she joined a local newspaper ‘Hearst Times Union’ as a crime reporter in Albany, New York.

Career

• Martha Gellhorn started her career by writing in the local newspapers. But her determination to become a foreign correspondent drove her to travel to Europe in 1930. She wrote a brochure for the ‘Holland American Line’ to collect the expenditure of her transoceanic trip.
• Gellhorn stayed in France for two years and worked for the United Press bureau in Paris. But the organization fired her because of protesting against sexual harassment by a man in the office. She spent years traveling Europe and writing for newspapers in Paris covering fashion pages for Vogue. During her days in Europe, she became an active member of the pacifist movement. She wrote about her experiences in the book ‘What Mad Pursuit’ published in 1934.
• In 1932, she returned to the US and met Harry Hopkins, 8th secretary of commerce and a close advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. Her writings impressed Hopkins and he hired Gellhorn as a field investigator for the ‘Federal Emergency Relief Administration’ (FERA). This organization was created by the president to end the great depression in the US. But the organization fired her for encouraging the staffs to break the office window to draw the attention of the boss. Gellhorn continued to visit the white house to assist the first lady to write my day column in ‘The Women’s Home Companion’.
• In 1937, ‘Collier’s Weekly’ hired Gellhorn to report on the Spanish Civil War. During this time, celebrity writer Ernest Hemingway accompanied  her on her Spain tour. She was a leading reporter in Germany during the rise of Adolf Hitler and after the outbreak of WWII, Gellhorn traveled half of the globe reporting about the war. She described various events she witnessed during the war in her novel ‘A Stricken Field’ was published.
• Post World War, she took a job in the ‘the Atlantic Monthly’ and covered the Vietnam War in 1960. She was also a leading reporter of the Arab-Israel conflicts occurred in 1970. She covered the civil war of Central America and in 1990, she finally retired from journalism.

Major Works

• Gellhorn traveled around the US making reports of how depression was affecting the hungry and homeless American people. These reports became part of important Govt. documents and also a great contribution to the creation of ‘The Trouble I’ve Seen’ a collection of short stories by Gellhorn.
• In 1934, during her early years of journalism, Gellhorn with a group of American students got invitation to visit Germany. There she experienced her first encounter with Fascism.
• Due to lack of settings, she hid in a hospital ship bathroom to witness the Normandy landings. She covered the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 at the age of 80.
• She reported on almost all the world conflicts of the 20th century and wrote a number of books, novels and novellas. A few of her letters were collectively printed in 2006.

Awards & Achievements

• Martha Gellhorn was the only woman reporter to land at Normandy on D-Day on June 6, 1944. She was also among the first troop of journalists to report from the Dachau concentration camp after the US troops liberated it on April 29, 1945.
• She was the only woman among five recipients of the ‘American Journalists stamp series’ in 2008.

Personal Life & Legacy

• The future journalist was fortunate with a multi-ethnic ancestry as her father and maternal grandfather were Jews while her maternal grandmother belonged to a protestant family.
• She met French writer Bertrand de Jouvenel while working in Paris and married him at the age of 22.
• During a family tour in Florida, She met Ernest Hemingway in 1936 and they married in 1940 though the couple were separated in 5 years.
• She adopted a child named Sandy in 1949 and the boy and her brother Alfred attended her during her last days. Gellhorn continued her journalism career with enthusiasm till the age of 80
• Towards the end of her life, she was almost blind and suffered from ovarian and liver cancer. Martha Gellhorn committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule on February 15, 1998, in London at the age of 89.

Trivia 

• With homes in 19 different locations in various countries, Martha Gellhorn spent her last days in Britain.