Martha Gellhorn
Description
Martha Gellhorn was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of a suffragette and a gynecologist. In 1926 she graduated from John Burroughs School and then attended Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia. In 1927, she left before graduating to pursue a career as a journalist. In 1930 she went to France for two years where she worked as a foreign correspondent for the United Press. While in Europe, she became active in the pacifist movement, which she wrote about in her first book, What Mad Pursuit (1934). Upon returning to the U.S., she worked as an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, reporting on the impact of the Depression on the United States. Her reports caught the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the two women became lifelong friends. In 1936, on a trip to Key West, she met the author Ernest Hemingway. They travelled together in Spain, where she was reporting on the Spanish Civil War for Collier's Weekly. Later, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and in 1938 she was working in Czechoslovakia. She later reported the war from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore and Britain. She was among the first journalists to report from Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated. She married Hemingway in 1940, but her career as a journalist kept travelling for long periods of time, and they divorced in 1945. After the war, she covered the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and the civil wars in Central America for the Atlantic Monthly. In 1949, she adopted a son from an Italian orphanage, and although she was briefly a devoted mother, she soon left him to the care of her relatives in Englewood, and he eventually ended up in boarding school. She married Tom Matthews, editor-in-chief of Time magazine, in 1954; they were divorced in 1963. Aged 81, she travelled impromptu to Panama, where she wrote on the U.S. invasion. Only when the Bosnian war broke out in the 1990s did she concede she was too old to continue her career as a war correspondent. She died in London in 1998, aged 89, taking her own life after a long battle with cancer and near total blindness. She is considered to be one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. Gellhorn published a large number of books, including a collection of articles on war, The Face of War (1959), a novel about McCarthyism, The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1967), an account of her travels (including one trip with Ernest Hemingway), Travels With Myself and Another (1978) and a collection of her peacetime journalism, The View From the Ground (1988). Her selected letters were published posthumously in 2006.
Books
Letters of Martha Gellhorn
"Martha Gellhorn was one of the most extraordinary of all war correspondents, and her career tracked many of the flashpoints of the twentieth century: the Depression in the American south in the 1930s; the Spanish Civil War; the Second World War in Europe; the D-Day landings and the Vietnam War. She lived with Ernest Hemingway on and off for eight years, and was married to him for four; and she numbered among her close friends Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the President of the United States; the writers H. G. Wells and Sybille Bedford; the photographer Robert Capa and the composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein." "Martha never kept a 'writer's compost heap' of diaries, but every day she wrote letters - to her mother, her sons, her lovers and friends - and these letters, read together, provide an immediate and intimate portrait of a remarkable life. Her letters have been selected and edited for publication by her biographer, Caroline Moorehead."--BOOK JACKET.
Great World War II Stories
A perfect morning (from The young lions) / Irwin Shaw Lunghua camp (from Empire of the Sun) / J.G. Ballard The journey (from A town like Alice) / Nevil Shute The birth of an idea (from The man who never was) / Ewen Montague The big day (from From here to eternity) / James Jones Abducting the general (from Ill met by midnight) / W. Stanley Moss The landing at Kuralei (from Tales of the South Pacific) / James A. Michener Shall I live for a ghost (from The last enemy) / Richard Hillary Billy Pilgrim (from Slaughterhouse Five) / Kurt Vonnegut Battalion in defense (from Officers and gentlemen) / Evelyn Waugh Anopopei (from The naked and the dead) / Norman Mailer 'Plane land here' (from Wingate's raiders) / Charles J. Rolo Mission asymptote (from The white rabbit) / Bruce Marshall Fraternizing with the enemy? (from Reach for the sky) / Paul Brickhill Shooting party (from Grand party) Graham Brooks H-hour (from The longest day) / Cornelius Ryan Into Germany (from Carve her name with pride) / R.J. Minney Ironbottom Sound (from Ironbottom Sound) / Lindsay Baly The first bid for freedom (from The Colditz story) / P.R. Reed Some were unlucky (from Enemy coast ahead) / Guy Gibson, VC May 1941 (from Nella Last's diary) / Nella Last Major major major major (from Catch 22) / Joseph Heller The battle of the bulge (from The face of war) / Martha Gelhorn The invasion of Papua (from Retreat from Kokoda) / Raymond Paull No trouble at all (from The stories of flying officer X) / H.E. Bates Stalingrad The story of the battle (from Stalingrad point of return) / Ronald Seth The soldier looks for his family / John Prebble The white mouse and the Maquis d'Auvergne (from The white mouse) / Nancy Wake Fear of death / F.J. Salfeld The invaders (from The Moon is down) / John Steinbeck The compass rose (from The cruel sea) / Nicholas Monsarrat The diary of a desert rat (from The diary of a desert rat) / R.L. Crimp The Mannerheim Line (from Of many men) / James Aldridge Midway (from Torpedo Junction) / Robert J. Casey Hiroshima the fire (from Hiroshima) / John Hersey
Travels with Myself and Another
"Martha Gellhorn was so fearless in a male way, and yet utterly capable of making men melt," writes New Yorker literary editor Bill Buford. As a journalist, Gellhorn covered every military conflict from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and Nicaragua. She also bewitched Eleanor Roosevelt's secret love and enraptured Ernest Hemingway with her courage as they dodged shell fire together.Hemingway is, of course, the unnamed "other" in the title of this tart memoir, first published in 1979, in which Gellhorn describes her globe-spanning adventures, both accompanied and alone. With razor-sharp humor and exceptional insight into place and character, she tells of a tense week spent among dissidents in Moscow; long days whiled away in a disused water tank with hippies clustered at Eilat on the Red Sea; and her journeys by sampan and horse to the interior of China during the Sino-Japanese War.Now including a foreward by Bill Buford and photographs of Gellhorn with Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Gary Cooper, and others, this new edition rediscovers the voice of an extraordinary woman and brings back into print an irresistibly entertaining classic
The face of war
Martha Gellhorn was a war correspondent for nearly fifty years. From the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the wars in Central America in the mid-eighties, her reports reflected her feelings for people no matter what their political ideologies, and the openness and vulnerability of her conscience. "I wrote very fast, as I had to," she says, "afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place." Whether in Java, Finland, the Middle East, or Vietnam, she used the same approach.
Wine of astonishment
Originally published in 1948, this powerful novel follows a U.S. Army infantry battalion in Europe through the last months of the Second World War - through the Battle of the Bulge, the Allied sweep across Germany, and the discovery of the Nazi death camps. Jacob Levy, a young soldier from St. Louis, has never given much thought to politics, world affairs, or his own Jewish heritage, but after the liberation of Dachau, he confronts the horror of the Holocaust and takes his own violent revenge. Jolted into a new understanding of humanity's connectedness, he comes to terms with his own Jewish identity and grapples with questions of individual moral responsibility that are still contemporary fifty years later. In her afterword, Martha Gellhorn traces the roots of the novel in her own experience as a war correspondent who first heard of the Nazi concentration camps during the Spanish Civil War and herself got to Dachau a week after American soldiers discovered the camp at the end of a village street.
Liana
In the stifling heat and melting nights of the tropics, love comes naturally to Pierre, the exiled Frenchman, and Liana, native wife of the richest man on the island. In a realistic analysis of a woman's degradation, this novel handles a delicate subject with frankness and power.
The view from the ground
Presented for the first time aregs from the tinderboxes across the political horizons of Castro's Cuba, the chambers of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and a small Mississippi town during the height of the civil rights movement. Atlantic Monthly Press.
Words of Ages
Explorers and early settlers -- The general history of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles / John Smith -- The history and present state of Virginia / Robert Beverley -- Of Plymouth Plantation / William Bradford -- "A model of Christian charity" / John Winthrop -- "In memory of my dear grandchild Anne Bradstreet" / Anne Bradstreet -- "The minister's black veil" / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Voices of a revolution -- "Sinners in the hands of an angry God" / Jonathan Edwards -- "The way to wealth" / Benjamin Franklin -- "Considerations on keeping Negroes" / John Woolman -- "The last of the Mohicans: a narrative of 1757" / James Fenimore Cooper -- Common sense / Thomas Paine -- Declaration of independence / Thomas Jefferson -- personal letters / John Adams & Abigail Adams -- The search for a national identity -- "On the emigration to America and peopling the western country" / Philip Freneau -- "Federalist no.2" / John Jay -- "The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano" / Olaudah Equiano -- The history of the Lewis and Clark expedition / Meriwether Lewis & William Clark -- A tour on the prairies / Washington Irving -- "Tecumseh's plea to the Choctaws and the Chickasaws" / Tecumseh -- The shackles of power: three Jeffersonian decades / John Dos Passos. A confident nation -- "The young American" / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- "Resistance to civil government" / Henry David Thoreau -- Woman in the nineteenth century / Margaret Fuller -- "Great are the myths" / Walt Whitman -- "Annexation" / John L. O'Sullivan -- Personal memoirs / Juan Nepomuceno Seguin -- Slavery and the abolition movement -- Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass / Frederick Douglass -- Incidents in the life of a slave girl / Harriet Jacobs -- Uncle Tom's cabin / Harrriet Beecher Stowe -- Sociology for the South / George Fitzhugh -- "Appeal to the Christian women of the South" / Angelina Grimke Weld -- "The hunters of men" / John Greenleaf Whittier -- Civil war and reconstruction -- "The portent" / Herman Melville -- The red badge of courage: an episode of the American Civil War / Stephen Crane -- "Hospital sketches" / Louisa May Alcott -- "O Captain! My Captain!" / Walt Whitman -- "Up from slavery" / Booker T. Washington -- The souls of Black folk / W.E.B. DuBois. Industrializing America -- The closing of the frontier -- O pioneers! / Willa Cather -- "Chiquita" / Bret Harte -- The life and adventure of Nat Love, better known in the cattle country as Deadwood Dick / Nat Love -- "Kansas I" / A Mexican Folk Ballad -- "The passing of the buffalo" / Hamlin Garland -- Black Elk speaks / Black Elk -- Artists render industrialization and urbanization -- "What the engines said" / Bret Harte -- "Life in the iron mills" / Rebecca Harding Davis -- The age of innocence / Edith Wharton -- "Proem: to Brooklyn Bridge" / Hart Crane -- Yekl: a tale of the New York ghetto / Abraham Cahan -- "Chicago" / Carl Sandburg -- Social critics and reformers -- "We are all bound up together" / Francis E. Watkins Harper -- Eighty years and more: reminiscences 1815-1897 / Elizabeth Cady Stanton -- "A church mouse" / Mary Wilkins Freeman -- Huckleberry Finn / Samuel L. Clemens -- The shame of the cities / Lincoln Steffens -- The jungle / Upton Sinclair. Americans abroad and World War I -- The portrait of a lady / Henry James -- "The white man's burden" / Rudyard Kipling -- "The real 'white man's burden'" / Ernest Crosby -- "Hallelujahs" / Jose de Diego -- One of ours / Willa Cather -- "next to of course god america i" / E. E. Cummings -- Democracy and adversity -- The jazz age -- The great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- "Song of perfect propriety" / Dorothy Parker -- The flivver king / Upton Sinclair -- Jazz / Toni Morrison -- "The weary blues" / Langston Hughes -- Their eyes were watching God / Zora Neale Hurston -- The Great Depression and the New Deal -- The big money / John Dos Passos -- Waiting for Lefty / Clifford Odets -- "Women on the breadlines" / Meridel LeSueur -- The grapes of wrath / John Steinbeck -- "Colonial Park" / Ralph Ellison -- "Proud day" / Genevieve Taggard. World War II -- "Freedom" / E. B. White -- Battle cry / Leon Uris -- Farewell to Manzanar / Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston -- "Apostrophe to the land" / Countee Cullen -- The face of war / Martha Gellhorn -- Night / Elie Wiesel -- Hiroshima / John Hershey -- The challenges of power -- Prosperity and anxiety -- An American childhood / Annie Dillard -- The man in the gray flannel suit / Sloan Wilson -- On the road / Jack Kerouac -- Coming of age in Mississippi / Anne Moody -- The cruicible / Arthur Miller -- The right stuff / Tom Wolfe -- Rights and revolutions -- "Letter from a Birmingham jail" / Martin Luther King, Jr. -- "Message to the grass roots" / Malcolm X -- "Why I want a wife" / Judy Brady -- The house on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros -- Lakota woman / Mary Crow Dog -- "Blowin' in the wind" / Bob Dylan -- The Vietnam years -- One very hot day / David Halberstam -- Going after Cacciato / Tim O'Brien -- "Life at war" / Denise Levertov -- American pastoral / Philip Roth -- "Letters from my father" / Robert Olen Butler.