Martha Gellhorn
Martha Ellis Gellhorn was an American journalist and novelist who is the first female war correspondents. Martha Ellis Gellhorn (Nov 8, 1908 – Feb 15, 1998) was an American travel writer, novelist and journalist, who is also considered as the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. Born in 1908 in St. Louis, Missouri, she began her writing career as a crime writer in 1920s.
She reported on almost every major world struggle and conflict that took place during her 60-year of career. In 1930, to become a foreign correspondent she went to France for 2 years, where she started her career as Journalist in Paris at the United Press bureau. While in Europe, she became lively in the pacifist movement, writing about her experiences in What Mad Pursuit (her book published in 1934). Her storied life as female war correspondents. After meeting Ernest Hemingway, American novelist in late 1936, and she travelled with him to cover the Spanish Civil War in Madrid the following year.
Martha Ellis Gellhorn went on to cover every war that emerged out during her lifetime, till the mid of 1990s when she started facing few health issues. Yet often remembered for her brief marriage to famous American author Ernest Hemingway, Martha Ellis Gellhorn refused to be a "footnote" to his life; during her career that covered some six decades, she worked on a dozen wars and drew admiration for her fictional work.
After returning to the United States, Martha Gellhorn was employed by Harry Hopkins, who she had met through her companionship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, as a field investigator for the FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration), created by Franklin D. Roosevelt to support in the war on the Great Depression. She travelled almost all the states of the United States for FERA to report on the influence of the Depression on the country. Martha Ellis Gellhorn’s workings were the basis of a collection of short stories, The Trouble I've Seen (1936).
**Childhood & Early Life**
· She was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the daughter of Edna Fischel Gellhorn, a suffragist, and Jewish origin George Gellhorn, a gynaecologist (German-born). Her maternal grandfather came from Jewish origin and her maternal grandmother were of a Protestant family.
· Her brother, Walter Gellhorn, was a famous law professor at world’s famous Columbia University. Her younger brother, Alfred Gellhorn, was a noted oncologist, and past dean of the University Of Pennsylvania School Of Medicine.
· Martha graduated from John Burroughs School in St. Louis in 1926, and joined in Philadelphia’s Bryn Mawr College. In 1927, she left before graduating to groom a career as a beginner in journalism.
· She first went to Gastonia, North Carolina, where she used her communication and imagination skill to report on how the folks of that region were affected by the Despair. Later, she worked with Dorothea Lange to collect the document of the everyday lives of the hungry.
· Her reports later became essential part of the official government files for the Great Misery. They were able to examine topics that were not usually open to females of the 1930s, which made Martha Gellhorn, as well as Lange, chief contributors to American history.
**Career**
· Martha Gellhorn was a notable war correspondent and she covered almost every war that occurred across the globe over a period of nearly 60 years. Born in 1908 in St. Louis, Missouri, Martha commenced her writing career and communication skill as a crime writer in the late 1920s.
· She worked for various publications and joined the United Press Bureau, where she become a foreign correspondent. Her storied life as a war reporter started when she met Ernest Hemingway in the year 1936. Martha Gellhorn traveled with him to Madrid to cover the Spanish Civil War.
· During her career that covered some six decades, she spanned a dozen wars and drew praise for her fictitious and imaginary work. Martha Gellhorn worked for the Atlantic Monthly, covering the Arab-Israel war and Vietnam War in the 1960s-70s.
· She celebrated her 70th birthday in 1979 and continued working in the same decade, covering the wars in Central America. As she approached age 80, she began to slow down but managed to cover the US invasion of Panama in the year1989. Martha Gellhorn finally retired from journalism in the 1990s.
**Major Works**
· Martha Gellhorn published numerous books, including a pool of articles on war. Her famous publishing articles include The Face of War (1959), The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1967) and a novel about McCarthyism. Including one trip with Hemingway, Travels with Myself and Another (1978); and a collection of her flip side or peacetime of her career, The View from the Ground (1988).
· Her fictional work, famous for its lean prose, includes The Trouble I've Seen (1936), the novels The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1967) and A Stricken Field (1939) and a pool of novellas, The Weather in Africa (1978).
**Awards & Achievements**
· On October 5, 2007, the US Postal Service announced the honor of five 20th-century journalists with first-class rate postage stamps, to be dispensed on April 22, 2008: John Hersey; Martha Gellhorn; Rubén Salazar; George Polk; and Eric Sevareid.
· Martha Gellhorn was the first journalists to report from Dachau concentration camp after liberation by Allied Troops.
· In the year 2011, Martha Gellhorn was the key subject of long duration episode of the World Media Rights series Extraordinary Women, which airs periodically in BBC.
· In 2012, Martha Gellhorn was played by the famous actor Nicole Kidman in Philp Kaufman's film, Hemingway & Gellhorn.
· The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 1999 is named after Martha Gellhorn.
**Personal Life & Legacy**
· Martha Gellhorn was also the third wife of famous American novelist Ernest Hemingway, She and Hemingway lived together for four years, before marrying in Dec 1940 (marriage 1940 to 1945).
· Between marriages after divorcing him in 1945, Martha had romantic connections with an American businessman, (1945) Laurance Rockefeller; journalist William Walton (1947); and David Gurewitsch (1950), a medical doctor.
· In 1954, Martha Gellhorn married, T. S. Matthews, the former managing editor of Time Magazine and relocated to London, which was later turn out to be her home for the rest of her life. She then divorced him in 1963.
· At the age of 89, completely blind due to cataract and suffering from ovarian cancer, she died in 1998 apparently by committing suicide.
Reference from:
Well written!
ReplyDelete