Thursday, January 16, 2020

Martha Gellhorn, daring War Correspondent and Writer



Martha Gellhorn was an American journalist and novelist and one of the first few female correspondents of the 20th century. With her sensitivity and power of prose, she reported virtually on every major world conflict that took place in her career that includes the Spanish Civil War, the Vietnam War, and World War II. More so than garnering praise for her fiction and prose writing, she is often remembered as being the ex-wife of the American novelist Ernest Hemingway. Amassing a career span of sixty years, Gellhorn, "a cocky, raspy-voiced, chain-smoking maverick," refused just to be referenced as a footnote in Hemingway's life, and lived a life that was as much world-spanning and thrilling as her ex-husband's. With her fearless drive and extraordinary determination, she did not let anyone stand in her way once she committed herself to her cause for the common good. Her last few years were grief-stricken and painful. To this day, she is considered one of the eminent personalities who pioneered war reporting, especially for women all over the world. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for journalism is awarded to journalists with remarkable work in their fields.
Childhood & Early Life
  • Gellhorn was born on November 8, 1908, at St. Louis, Missouri, to Dr. George and Edna Fischel Gellhorn. 
  • Her father was a gynecologist and also a professor of medicine at Washington University. Her mother was a social reformer, an influential civic leader, and a suffragist. 
  • She was the third child and the only daughter. Her brother Walter was an accomplished professor of law at Columbia University, and her younger brother Alfred was an acclaimed oncologist and the dean at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. 
  • Martha graduated from the John Burroughs School in St. Louis. She attended Bryn Mawr College that was several miles outside of Pennsylvania. In 1927, she left without graduation, to pursue her journalism career. 

Career
  • She started working for the 'New Republic'a dynamic, political magazine and then for a newspaper, namely The 'Albany Times Union' in Albany, New York, as a crime reporter. She returned to St. Louis after knowing about her parents being worried. 
  • In Paris, she started working for the United Press Bureau and became an activist in the pacifist movement. She wrote about all these experiences in her book 'What Mad Pursuit' (1934). 
  • Harry Hopkins, a top official in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, read the novel. Thoroughly impressed by her writing, he then hired her to travel the country and write about the effects of the Great Depression. Gellhorn traveled majorly around the United States to prepare a report on the impacts of the Depression. She made her first stop at Gastonia, North Carolina. It was mainly around this time that she forged a lifelong friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
  • In 1936, Gellhorn met legendary American novelist Ernest Hemingway. From there, they traveled together to Spain, where she reported extensively on the rise of fascism and the Spanish Civil War. She went to Madrid in the spring of 1937, only carrying a single knapsack and $50, to report on the war for 'Collier's Weekly'.
  • She later reported on the rising power of Adolf Hitler from Germany. The outbreak of World War II happened, and she penned down these events in the novel 'A Stricken Field' (1940). She then covered the war from England, Burma, Hong Kong, Finland, and Singapore. With the absence of official press credentials overlooking the Normandy landings, she possibly hid in a hospital ship bathroom, and after arrival, impersonated a stretcher bearer.
  • After covering the war, she went on to work for the 'Atlantic Monthly'. She covered the Arab-Israel conflicts and the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s. She continued working, covering the civil wars in Central America through her 70th birthday in 1979. Approaching 80, she still determinately reported on the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, finally taking retirement from journalism as the 1990s began.

Major Works
  • 'The Trouble I've Seen' (1936), a collection of short stories that depicted the Depression Era
  • 'A Stricken Field' (1940), a novel set in Czechoslovakia describing the outbreak and moral barbarity of war
  • 'The View From the Ground' (1989), presents her six decades of experience in the field of war journalism

Awards & Achievements
  • She was the only woman at Normandy on D-Day on June 6, 1944.
  • She was definitely among the first to report from Dachau concentration camp after U.S. troops liberated it on April 29, 1945.

Personal life and Legacy
  • Her first significant relationship was with Bertrand de Jouvenel, a French economist. She was 22 years old at that time. It lasted from 1930 till 1934. 
  • In 1936, she met Ernest Hemingway in Key West, Florida. They got married in 1940. Gellhorn had a bitter experience being continually cited as Hemingway's third wife. She always expressed her discontent at the reference. Their marriage was a tumultuous one that eventually ended in divorce.
  • While still being married to Hemingway, she had an affair with U.S. paratrooper Major General James M. Gavin. 
  • In 1949, Gellhorn adopted a boy, Sandy. After spending a brief time together, Sandy was left in the care of her relatives in Englewood, New Jersey. Their relationship eventually became embittered.
  • After becoming wholly blind and battling with liver and ovarian cancer in the later stages of her life, she committed suicide on February 15, 1998. 
  • She transformed war reporting, and her defiance continues to inspire countless female journalists who have followed in her footsteps on the battlefield.
  • In 1999, Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was instituted in her memory.
Trivia
· She had homes created in 19 diverse locales.
Cause of Death: Suicide.
Personality: Ambitious, Dynamic.
Character Traits: Argumentative.
Challenges Faced: Divorce, Exile.

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