Novelist, essayist and journalist, Martha Gellhorn (8 November 1908 - 15 February 1998) was a war correspondent during some of the most momentous conflicts of the 20th century, from the Spanish Civil War and World War II to Vietnam, the Six-Day War in the Middle East and various conflicts in Central America. As a correspondent for Collier's Weekly, she reported on the Spanish Civil War, along with her future husband, Ernest Hemingway. From Spain she moved to Germany, chronicling Hitler's consolidation of power and the onset of World War II. She reported from virtually every theater of the Second World War, — Czechoslovakia, Finland, Britain, Burma, Singapore and Hong Kong — and even snuck aboard a hospital ship to witness the D-Day landings in Normandy. Her reports on the Middle Eastern and Central American conflicts appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. A collection of her war correspondences, The Face of War, was published in 1959.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Gellhorn graduated in 1926 from John Burroughs School there and enrolled in Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia. Gellhorn was an atheist and did not believe in an afterlife. Although both parents were Jewish, Gellhorn was raised as a secular humanist. In 1927, she left before graduating to pursue a career as a journalist. Her first articles appeared in The New Republic. In 1930, determined to become a foreign correspondent, she went to France for two years where she worked at the United Press bureau in Paris. While in Europe, she became active in the pacifist movement and wrote about her experiences in the book, What Mad Pursuit (1934).
Upon returning to the US, Gellhorn was hired by Harry Hopkins as an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which sent her to report about the impact of the Depression on the United States. Her reports for that agency caught the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the two women became lifelong friends. Her findings were the basis of a novella, The Trouble I've Seen (1936).
Gellhorn remained a committed leftist throughout her life and was contemptuous of those, like Rebecca West, who became more conservative. She considered the so-called objectivity of journalists “nonsense”, and used journalism to reflect her politics. Politically, Gellhorn had two major favorites, Israel and the Spanish Republic. For Gellhorn, Dachau had “changed everything” and she became a life-long champion of Israel.
At the age of 89, ill and nearly completely blind, she ended her life by taking a poison pill.
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