Ernest Hemingway
- Author
- Journalist
Married to · 1940–1945
The war marriage — Madrid under shellfire, then Cuba, then rival bylines racing to the Normandy summer; two correspondents in one house, and the only wife who left him first.
Martha Gellhorn
War correspondent who covered the Spanish Civil War, D-Day, and conflicts across five more decades; Hemingway's third wife, 1940–1945.
In images
Details
- 1908–1998
- 8 November 1908
- St. Louis, Missouri
- 15 February 1998
- London, England
- American
- Ernest HemingwayT. S. Matthews
- Sandy Gellhorn
- JournalistAuthor
- Martha Ellis Gellhorn
About Martha Gellhorn
Martha Gellhorn reported wars for sixty years. She covered Spain, Finland, China, Italy, the Normandy landings, the liberation of Dachau, the Nuremberg trials, Vietnam, the Arab–Israeli wars, and the American invasion of Panama, the last of them at eighty-one.
She was married to Ernest Hemingway for five of those years and spent much of the rest of her life declining to discuss it. She had published a novel and a book of Depression reporting before they met, and she outlasted him as a working correspondent by thirty-seven years.
Before the wars
She was born in St. Louis in 1908. Her mother, Edna Fischel Gellhorn, was a suffragist, and Martha grew up around the organized politics of women's rights. She went to Bryn Mawr and left before finishing, which was then a common route into newspapers.
In the early 1930s she moved to Paris for about two years to become a foreign correspondent. That is the whole of her first Paris: an American in her twenties trying to get hired, and writing a first novel out of European pacifist circles rather than reporting much of anything. The city gave her the ambition before it gave her the work.
The work came from the Depression. In 1934 she was hired to travel the United States and report what federal relief was actually doing for people, at times alongside the photographer Dorothea Lange. She turned that reporting into The Trouble I've Seen in 1936. The subject she found there stayed hers for six decades: the people a catastrophe happens to, rather than the men directing it.
Spain, and the marriage
She met Hemingway in Key West in 1936 and went to Spain the following year, reporting the civil war for Collier's and The New Yorker. They covered it together, and the experience went into For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he dedicated to her. They married in 1940.
Normandy
In 1944 Collier's accredited Hemingway as its European correspondent. It was the post Gellhorn had held, the magazine was entitled to one, and his was the larger name. Women correspondents were in any case barred from the invasion beaches.
She stowed away on a hospital ship, crossed with it, and went ashore at Normandy with the stretcher parties collecting wounded. She filed the story.
The accreditation system handed one correspondent a berth and left the other to stow away. She reported the landings from the beach.
Sixty years of it
The marriage ended in 1945. She entered Dachau days after its liberation, covered the Nuremberg trials, and kept going: Vietnam for The Guardian in 1966, then Central America, and Panama at eighty-one.
There was a life outside the reporting, conducted in the gaps. In 1949 she adopted a boy from an Italian orphanage, named him George Alexander and called him Sandy. She married the editor T. S. Matthews in 1954 and divorced him nine years later.
The Face of War, published in 1959, collected the war reporting. She expanded it three times as she added wars — in 1967, 1986, and 1993 — so its editions read as a career in outline.
London
She spent her last decades in London. A cataract operation failed and left her sight permanently damaged; on her last reporting trip, to Brazil in 1995, she could no longer read her own manuscripts. By the late 1990s she also had ovarian cancer, which had spread to her liver.
She died by suicide at her flat in Cadogan Square on 15 February 1998, at eighty-nine, by swallowing a cyanide capsule. Caroline Moorehead's biography, the fullest account of her last years, reports the capsule. English Heritage placed a blue plaque on the building in her memory.
Martha Gellhorn, illustrated
Six scenes from sixty years of reporting, drawn for The Paris Atlas — illustrations, not photographs.
Life events
Born 8 November in St. Louis, Missouri, to the suffragist Edna Fischel Gellhorn and the physician George Gellhorn.
Moves to Paris for about two years to become a foreign correspondent.
Reports on the Depression across the United States, at times traveling with the photographer Dorothea Lange.
Publishes The Trouble I've Seen, drawn from the relief reporting; meets Hemingway in Key West.
Reports the Spanish Civil War for Collier's and The New Yorker.
Marries Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls is published, dedicated to her.
Reports the war in China for Collier's.
With Martha Gellhorn, 1941 — the third marriage, two war correspondents headed for China. Loses the Collier's accreditation to Hemingway, stows away on a hospital ship, and goes ashore at Normandy with the stretcher parties.
Enters Dachau shortly after its liberation; the marriage ends.
Adopts a boy from an Italian orphanage, names him George Alexander, and calls him Sandy.
Marries the editor T. S. Matthews; they divorce nine years later.
Publishes The Face of War, expanded in 1967, 1986, and 1993 as she added later wars.
Reports the Vietnam War for The Guardian.
Covers the American invasion of Panama, aged 81.
Nearly blind and with ovarian cancer that has spread to her liver, she dies by suicide in London on 15 February, from a cyanide capsule, at 89.
People they knew
Maxwell Perkins
- Editor
Collaborated with
Perkins edited Gellhorn at Scribner's, publishing her first collection of short fiction, The Heart of Another, in 1941. She and Hemingway, married that same year, shared a publishing house and an editor.
Start here
The Face of War
Sixty years of war reporting in one volume, with the essays she wrote between the dispatches decades later. If it doesn't hold you, nothing else will.
Books by Martha Gellhorn
Her first novel, at twenty-five, and the one she spent the rest of her life leaving out.
Four novellas about Americans out of work, written by a twenty-seven-year-old who had spent a year being paid to go and look.
Prague in the months after Munich, written by a correspondent who had just been there and could not report the half of it.
Her first collection: nine stories written months after Spain and the Winter War, published by Scribner's in 1941 and never reprinted.
The richest man on a Caribbean island marries a young mixed-race woman to settle a score, and neither side of the island will have her.
The novel she made out of the winter fighting and what she found at Dachau — reissued forty years later under a colder title.
Stories from the peace that followed the war, written by someone unconvinced by it.
Four long stories about marriage, each one titled from a promise made at the altar.
Sixty years of war reporting in one book, written by someone who kept going back long after the story stopped being hers.
A Left Bank bachelor, two rich mistresses, and an arrangement that stops working. The only one of Gellhorn's novels set in Paris.
Three long stories about clever people who cannot see the thing standing in front of them. The title is a joke, and this was her last collection.
Six dispatches on what the war was doing to civilians, and the reporting that got her barred.
A foreign colony in a Mexican village in 1953, half of it driven out by the Red Scare. Gellhorn lived four years among people like them.
A travel book organised entirely around the trips that went wrong, and the funniest thing she ever wrote.
Three novellas about Europeans who stayed in East Africa: two sisters at a hotel on Kilimanjaro, a man building a farm in Kenya, a woman out of options.
The other half of the career: fifty years of reporting on everything that was not a war.
Fourteen novellas written between 1936 and 1978, gathered in one volume. For most of Gellhorn's fiction it is the only edition still in circulation.
Two war correspondents wrote a farce about two war correspondents. A hit in London in 1946, it closed on Broadway after four performances.
Sixty years of letters, edited by her biographer Caroline Moorehead. Faster, funnier and ruder than the prose Gellhorn published.
Gellhorn's letters from 1930 to 1949: the Depression, Spain, Normandy, Dachau and the Hemingway marriage, printed with the replies included.
Popular reading paths
Recommended starting order
- The Face of War
- A Stricken Field
- The Trouble I've Seen
- The View from the Ground
- Travels with Myself and Another
- Liana
- Pretty Tales for Tired People
- The Honeyed Peace
- The Wine of Astonishment
- Two by Two
- His Own Man
- Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
- The Heart of Another
- The Lowest Trees Have Tops
- The Short Novels of Martha Gellhorn
- The Weather in Africa
- Vietnam: A New Kind of War
- What Mad Pursuit
- Yours, for Probably Always
- Love Goes to Press
Publication order
- What Mad Pursuit
- The Trouble I've Seen
- A Stricken Field
- The Heart of Another
- Liana
- The Wine of Astonishment
- The Honeyed Peace
- Two by Two
- The Face of War
- His Own Man
- Pretty Tales for Tired People
- Vietnam: A New Kind of War
- The Lowest Trees Have Tops
- Travels with Myself and Another
- The Weather in Africa
- The View from the Ground
- The Short Novels of Martha Gellhorn
- Love Goes to Press
- Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
- Yours, for Probably Always
Most popular first
- A Stricken Field
- The Face of War
- The Trouble I've Seen
- The View from the Ground
- Travels with Myself and Another
- Liana
- Pretty Tales for Tired People
- The Honeyed Peace
- The Wine of Astonishment
- Two by Two
- His Own Man
- Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
- The Heart of Another
- The Lowest Trees Have Tops
- The Short Novels of Martha Gellhorn
- The Weather in Africa
- Vietnam: A New Kind of War
- What Mad Pursuit
- Yours, for Probably Always
- Love Goes to Press
In works
Dedicatee · Book
For Whom the Bell Tolls
They had reported Spain together, and the novel came out of it. The dedication is printed in the book; the marriage lasted five years.
— Ernest Hemingway Collection — Martha Gellhorn (Hemingway) | EH@JFK, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
Depicted in · Book
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Not a portrait. The JFK Library's account gives Maria her appearance, and divides her strength, toughness and loyalty between Maria and Pilar — and adds that Pilar is a composite who also owes much to Gertrude Stein. Gellhorn and Hemingway had reported the Spanish Civil War together, and that shared work is what the novel is built out of.
— Ernest Hemingway Collection — Martha Gellhorn (Hemingway) | EH@JFK, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
Organizations
Worked for · 1937–1946
Collier's
The weekly carried her from the Spanish Civil War through the Second World War. In 1944 it accredited Hemingway as its European correspondent, the post she had held, and she reached Normandy without it.
Questions about Martha Gellhorn
Was Martha Gellhorn the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day?
She is usually described that way, though accounts differ on whether she went ashore on 6 or 7 June. What is firmly documented is how she got there. Collier's had given its European accreditation to Hemingway, the post she had held, so she stowed away on a hospital ship, crossed the Channel with it, and went ashore with the stretcher parties collecting wounded. She reported the landings from the beach, without accreditation, and filed the story.
Was Martha Gellhorn a war correspondent before she met Hemingway?
No, but she was already a published writer. They met in Key West in 1936, by which time she had published a first novel and The Trouble I've Seen, four novellas drawn from her reporting on the Depression. Her war reporting began the following year in Spain, which the two of them covered at the same time.
Was Martha Gellhorn known as Martha Hemingway?
Only in the sense that she was married to him, from 1940 to 1945, and the name turns up in records of those years. She published as Martha Gellhorn before, during and after the marriage, objected to being introduced as anyone's wife, and spent five decades afterwards reporting under her own name. We index her as Gellhorn for the same reason she did.
What wars did Martha Gellhorn cover?
She began with the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and was still reporting in her eighties. In between came Finland, China, Italy, the Normandy landings, the liberation of Dachau, the Nuremberg trials, Vietnam for The Guardian in 1966, the Arab–Israeli wars, and conflicts in Central America. Her last assignment was the American invasion of Panama in 1989, at eighty-one.
Did Martha Gellhorn have children?
One son. In 1949 she adopted a boy from an Italian orphanage, named him George Alexander, and called him Sandy.
Why did Martha Gellhorn leave Hemingway?
She was the only one of his four wives to leave him, and the marriage ended in 1945. Her assignments increasingly set her own itinerary, Collier's having sent her to China in 1941, and in 1944 the magazine gave the European accreditation she had held to him. She spent much of the rest of her life declining to discuss the marriage.
How did Martha Gellhorn die?
She died by suicide at her flat in Cadogan Square, London, on 15 February 1998, at eighty-nine, by swallowing a cyanide capsule. She had ovarian cancer that had spread to her liver, and a failed cataract operation had left her nearly blind — by her last years she could not read her own manuscripts.
Which Martha Gellhorn book should you start with?
The Face of War, published in 1959. It collects the war reporting from Spain onward, and she expanded it three times, in 1967, 1986, and 1993, so its editions double as a map of the career. For the fiction, start with The Trouble I've Seen.
Sourced claims
Married to · 1940–1945
Ernest Hemingway
The war marriage — Madrid under shellfire, then Cuba, then rival bylines racing to the Normandy summer; two correspondents in one house, and the only wife who left him first.
Worked for · 1937–1946
Collier's
The weekly carried her from the Spanish Civil War through the Second World War. In 1944 it accredited Hemingway as its European correspondent, the post she had held, and she reached Normandy without it.
Dedicatee · 1940
For Whom the Bell Tolls
They had reported Spain together, and the novel came out of it. The dedication is printed in the book; the marriage lasted five years.
Depicted in · 1940
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Not a portrait. The JFK Library's account gives Maria her appearance, and divides her strength, toughness and loyalty between Maria and Pilar — and adds that Pilar is a composite who also owes much to Gertrude Stein. Gellhorn and Hemingway had reported the Spanish Civil War together, and that shared work is what the novel is built out of.
Collaborated with
Maxwell Perkins
Perkins edited Gellhorn at Scribner's, publishing her first collection of short fiction, The Heart of Another, in 1941. She and Hemingway, married that same year, shared a publishing house and an editor.