Martha Gellhorn Biography

American novelist and journalist, born in St Louis, Missouri, educated at Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia. Her career began as Paris correspondent for the New Republic. Her fiction, which is noted for its clarity and directness, is invariably informed by her experiences as a journalist and traveller. The Trouble I've Seen (1936), a set of four novellas, originated in her investigations of urban poverty during the American Depression. In 1937 she became a war correspondent with Collier's magazine and met Ernest Hemingway (to whom she was married from 1940 to 1945) while covering the Spanish Civil War; the short stories in The Heart of Another (1941) portray American reporters in Spain. Her subsequent novels include A Stricken Field (1940), set in Prague on the eve of the Second World War; His Own Man (1961), on expatriate life in Paris; and The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1969), which is set in Mexico. Among her further collections of short stories are The Honeyed Peace (1954), Two by Two (1958), and The Weather in Africa (1978); The Short Novels of Martha Gellhorn appeared in 1991. Her journalism is collected in The Face of War (1959), reports from a succession of major conflicts in Europe and Asia, and The View from the Ground (1988), articles on a wide range of social and political topics. Travels with Myself and Another (1979) is an autobiography.