Martha Ellis Gellhorn (8 November 1908 – 15 February 1998) was an American novelist, travel writer and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career.
She was the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945.
She died in 1998 by apparent suicide at the age of 89, ill and almost completely blind.
The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after her.
Gellhorn was born on 8 November 1908, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Edna Fischel Gellhorn, a suffragist, and George Gellhorn, a German-born gynecologist. Her father and maternal grandfather were Jewish, and her maternal grandmother came from a Protestant family. Her brother Walter became a noted law professor at Columbia University, and her younger brother Alfred was an oncologist and dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
At age 7, Gellhorn participated in "The Golden Lane", a rally for women's suffrage at the Democratic Party's 1916 national convention in St. Louis. Women carrying yellow parasols and wearing yellow sashes lined both sides of a main street leading to the St. Louis Coliseum. A tableau of the states was in front of the Art Museum; states that had not enfranchised women were draped in black. Gellhorn and another girl, Mary Taussig, stood in front of the line, representing future voters.
In 1926, Gellhorn graduated from John Burroughs School in St. Louis and enrolled in Bryn Mawr College, several miles outside Philadelphia. The following year, she left without having graduated to pursue a career as a journalist. Her first published 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, but was fired after she reported sexual harassment by a man connected with the agency. She spent years traveling Europe, writing for newspapers in Paris and St. Louis and covering fashion for Vogue. She became active in the pacifist movement and wrote about her experiences in her 1934 book What Mad Pursuit.
Returning to the United States in 1932, Gellhorn was hired by Harry Hopkins, whom she had met through her friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The Roosevelts invited Gellhorn to live at the White House and she spent evenings there helping Eleanor Roosevelt write correspondence and the first lady's "My Day" syndicated column. She was hired as a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), created by Franklin D. Roosevelt to help end the Great Depression. Gellhorn traveled around the United States for FERA to report on how the Depression was affecting the country. She first went to Gastonia, North Carolina. Later, she worked with Dorothea Lange, a photographer, to document the everyday lives of the hungry and homeless. Their reports became part of the official government files for the Great Depression. They were able to investigate topics that were not usually open to women of the 1930s. She drew on her research to write a collection of short stories, The Trouble I've Seen (1936). In Idaho doing FERA work, Gellhorn convinced a group of workers to break the windows of the FERA office to draw attention to their crooked boss. Although this worked, she was fired from FERA.
War in Europe and marriage to Hemingway
Gellhorn met Ernest Hemingway during a 1936 Christmas family trip to Key West, Florida. Gellhorn had been hired to report for Collier's Weekly on the Spanish Civil War, and the pair decided to travel to Spain together. The seven dispatches she sent from the Spanish battlefront from July 17, 1937 to November 1938 mostly dealt with the condition and anguish suffered by the civilians. Gellhorn and Hemingway celebrated Christmas of 1937 in Barcelona. In Germany, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler; in the spring of 1938, months before the Munich Agreement, she was in Czechoslovakia. After the outbreak of World War II, she described these events in the novel A Stricken Field (1940). She later reported the war from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore, and England.
In June 1944, Gellhorn applied to the British government for press accreditation to report on the Normandy landings; her application, like those of all female journalists, was refused. Lacking official press credentials, she drove to the south coast of England and, claiming to be a nurse, was allowed onto an American hospital ship about to depart for France. She promptly locked herself in a bathroom and crossed the Channel as a stowaway. Upon landing two days later, near Omaha Beach, she went ashore with a medical team to help recover wounded soldiers. For breaching military regulations, Gellhorn was subsequently arrested and stripped of her war correspondent accreditation. This did not stop her hitching a flight to Italy and then continuing to file reports throughout the war for Collier's. Later she recalled, "I followed the war wherever I could reach it." She was the only woman correspondent to land at Normandy on D-Day on 6 June 1944. She was among the first journalists to report from Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated by U.S. troops on 29 April 1945.
Gellhorn and Hemingway lived together off and on for four years, before marrying in November 1940. (Hemingway had ostensibly lived with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, until 1939). Increasingly resentful of Gellhorn's long absences during her reporting assignments, Hemingway wrote to her when she left their Finca Vigía estate near Havana in 1943 to cover the Italian Front: "Are you a war correspondent, or wife in my bed?" Hemingway, however, would later go to the front just before the Normandy landings, and Gellhorn also went, with Hemingway trying to block her travel. When she arrived, by means of a dangerous ocean voyage, in war-torn London (he had landed there eleven days before her, via an RAF flight on which she had arranged a seat for him), she told him she had had enough. She had found, as had his other wives, that, as described by Bernice Kert in The Hemingway Women: "Hemingway could never sustain a long-lived, wholly satisfying relationship with any one of his four wives. Married domesticity may have seemed to him the desirable culmination of romantic love, but sooner or later he became bored and restless, critical and bullying." After four contentious years of marriage, they divorced in 1945.
The 2012 film Hemingway & Gellhorn is based on these years. The 2011 documentary film No Job for a Woman: The Women Who Fought to Report WWII features Gellhorn and how she changed war reporting.
After the war, Gellhorn worked for the Atlantic Monthly, covering the Vietnam War and the Arab-Israel conflicts in the 1960s and 70s. She passed her 70th birthday in 1979 but continued working in the following decade, covering the civil wars in Central America. As she approached 80, Gellhorn began to slow down physically, although she still managed to cover the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. In 1990, she went door to door in the slum areas of Panama City to report on civilian casualties resulting from the U.S. invasion. She finally retired from journalism as the 1990s began. An operation for cataracts was unsuccessful and left her with permanently impaired vision. Gellhorn announced that she was "too old" to cover the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s. She did manage one last overseas trip to Brazil in 1995 to report on poverty in that country, which was published in the literary journal Granta. This last feat was accomplished with great difficulty as Gellhorn's eyesight was failing, and she could not read her own manuscripts.
Gellhorn's books include a collection of articles on war, The Face of War (1959); The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1967), a novel about McCarthyism; an account of her travels (including one trip with Hemingway), Travels with Myself and Another (1978); and a collection of her peacetime journalism, The View from the Ground (1988).