Gellhorn, Martha (1908-1998), was an American journalist who became best known as a war correspondent. She also wrote travel pieces and fiction.
Martha Ellis Gellhorn was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on Nov. 8, 1908. In 1929, the weekly political journal The New Republic published her first articles. In 1930, Gellhorn moved to Paris, where she worked for the United Press news agency and became involved with the pacifist movement. Pacifism was a focus of her first novel, What Mad Pursuit (1934). She returned to the United States in 1934 to work for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, reporting on the effects of government policies on Americans during the Great Depression. Her book of four novellas, The Trouble I’ve Seen (1936), deals with her experiences from that time.
In late 1936, while in Key West, Florida, Gellhorn met the American writer Ernest Hemingway. The two discussed the Spanish Civil War, which was being fought at that time. Early the next year, Gellhorn went to Spain and was given a job covering the war for Collier’s Weekly. In Spain, she met up with Hemingway again. They married in 1940 and divorced in 1945.
From the late 1930’s through 1945, Gellhorn traveled through much of Asia and Europe to cover World War II (1939-1945), the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), and the Russo-Finnish wars (1939-1945). She reported on such events as the D-Day landings at Normandy (where she stowed away on a ship and posed as a stretcher bearer to gain access), and the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany.
For about the next 40 years, Gellhorn traveled the world reporting on wars and conflicts in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. She covered the 1961 trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for The Atlantic Monthly. Her articles on various conflicts were collected in The Face of War (1959, later updated). In later life, she wrote book reviews and travel articles until her loss of vision restricted her activity. She died in London, where she had lived for many years, on Feb. 15, 1998.
