Marthalis Gellhorn Summary

Martha Ellis Gellhorn

Martha Ellis Gellhorn was an American journalist, novelist & travel writer, who is considered to be one of the best American war reporters of the twentieth century. She was one of the first female correspondents who covered & reported on virtually every major conflict in a writing career spanning more than six decades. She was recognised more for her marriage to acclaimed writer Ernest Hemingway than for her reporting & fiction writing. She greatly admired the writings of Ernest Hemingway. Gellhorn left the United States after World War II, criticizing it for being a colonial power. She lived in several countries from Mexico to Kenya, France &Italy to Cuba before finally settling in Great Britain in her final years. Although

• Gellhorn worked with Dorothea Lange, a photographer, to document the everyday lives of the hungry & the homeless.

• Their reports later became part of the official government files for the Great Depression. Gellhorn’s observations and findings were the basis of a collection of short stories ‘The Trouble I’ve seen’ (1936).

• Gellhorn’s first encounter with Hemingway was during a 1936 Christmas family trip to Florida. They travelled to Spain together to cover the Spanish Civil War, where Gellhorn had been hired to report for ‘Collier’s Weekly’.

• She reported from Germany on the rise of Adolf Hitler & was in Czechoslovakia in 1938.

• Gellhorn described the events in the World War II in her novel ‘A Stricken Field’ (1940). She later reported from Finland, Hongkong, Burma, Singapore & England.

• While working for the ‘Atlantic Monthly’, Gellhorn covered the Vietnam War & Arab-Israel conflicts.

• She continued working in the decade following her 70th birthday, covering civil wars in Central America & managed to cover the United States invasion of Panama in 1989, before finally retiring from journalism in the