Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) was born in St Louis, Missouri. In 1930 she talked her way into a free passage to Europe and arrived in Paris with seventy-five dollars in her pocket and the conviction that she could earn a living as a foreign correspondent. She returned to the United States in 1934, and two years later published her acclaimed book of four linked novellas on Depression-hit America, The Trouble I've Seen. It was at this time that she happened to run into Ernest Hemingway, whom she married. In 1937 she returned to Europe as a war correspondent, and for the next nine years she reported on the wars in Spain, Finland, China, Java and finally Europe in World War Two. After 1946 she continued to report on whatever engaged her interest and concern, from Vietnam to the Middle East and the wars in Central America. She was the author of novels, collections of stories, books of novellas, works of non-fiction and a play. The Face of War, her collected war reports from Spain in 1937 to Panama in 1990, and The View from the Ground, a collection of her peacetime correspondence, are both available in paperback from Granta Books.