Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn

A Life

Summary

Discover the life of one of the twentieth century's most significant and notorious war correspondents, and the third wife of Ernest Hemingway.

Martha Gellhorn's journalism tracks many of the flashpoints of the twentieth century; as a young woman she witnessed the suffering of the American Depression and risked her life in the Spanish Civil War. Her dispatches from the front made her a legend, yet her private life was often messy and volcanic.

Her determination to be a war correspondent - and her conspicuous success - contributed to the breakdown of her infamously stormy marriage to Ernest Hemingway. In this mesmerising biography of a life that spanned the twentieth century, Moorehead reveals how passionately Martha fought against injustice, and how determined she was to catch the human story.

'A deeply sympathetic portrait... [it shows] an overwhelming sense of what it is to be human' Daily Telegraph

Reviews

  • Gellhorn is a superb subject for biography. Caroline Moorehead has seized the opportunity with an elan that her subject would have admired. The result is an adventure story which, true to the genre, has moments of both triumph and tragedy
    Independent on Sunday

About the author

Caroline Moorehead

Caroline Moorehead is a bestselling and prizewinner author, and the biographer of Bertrand Russell, Freya Stark, Iris Origo, Madame de la Tour du Pin and Martha Gellhorn. Her recent books - a quartet focussed on resistance to dictatorship, particularly in Italy - were shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Orwell Prize and the Costa Biography Award. She lives in London.
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