The Face of War
Its deliberate companion — the wars in one volume, everything else in this one.
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The View from the Ground
The other half of the career: fifty years of reporting on everything that was not a war.
- 1988
About Martha Gellhorn
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeThe companion volume to The Face of War, collecting the peacetime journalism she filed between the conflicts — the American Depression, post-war Europe, the McCarthy years, Israel and the Palestinian refugee camps, England, and the state of the world as she found it into the 1980s. Read beside the war book it corrects the standard picture of her: the battlefield was where she became famous, not where she spent most of her working life.
The story, in more detail
Gellhorn is precise about what the book is: articles from six decades of peacetime reporting, where peacetime means only that the country in the background was not at war at the moment of writing. The pieces run from a lynching in the American South in 1931 through the House Un-American Activities Committee, Israel in the fifties, the Eichmann trial in 1962, the death of Franco in 1976, torture in El Salvador in 1984, and the British miners' strike. It is a wider range than the war book and a stranger one, because the through-line is not a conflict but her own attention.
The articles are grouped by decade and each decade opens with an introduction explaining what she was doing and how the piece came to be written. Those introductions are the pleasure of the volume and also its limit: she is candid about work, money, politics and her own misjudgements, and she leaves out the marriages, the love affairs and the child entirely. A reader looking for the life will find the working life and a deliberate silence around the rest.
Why we recommend it
It resizes the war reporter
Fifty years of peacetime journalism is the bulk of the career, and almost none of the reputation. This is the volume that shows the proportion.
The McCarthy pieces
She covered American political fear at close range, and it produced some of the sharpest writing in the book.
Where the difficult work lives
Including the Palestine reporting, which we would rather present with its arguments visible than leave out.
What this book explores
Timeline
1931–1984
The peacetime reporting the book gathers spans these decades — from a lynching in the American South through the McCarthy years, the 1962 Eichmann trial, Franco's death in 1976, and torture in El Salvador.
1988
Atlantic Monthly Press publishes the collection as the companion to The Face of War, its pieces grouped by decade, each opening with a retrospective introduction.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Atlantic Monthly Press
- 1988
Reader reviews
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The Depression reporting that became fiction in 1936 appears here in its original form.
Read our takeThe View from the Ground: frequently asked questions
Who wrote The View from the Ground?
Martha Gellhorn. It was published in 1988, the companion volume to her war journalism.
What is The View from the Ground?
A collection of her peacetime journalism filed between the wars — the American Depression, post-war Europe, the McCarthy years, Israel and the Palestinian refugee camps, England, and the state of the world into the 1980s.
How does it relate to The Face of War?
The Face of War collects her war reporting; The View from the Ground collects everything she filed in peacetime, drawn from six decades.
What does she mean by "peacetime"?
Gellhorn is precise about it: peacetime means only that the country she is reporting in is not itself at war. The subjects are often just as hard.
Why read it?
For the full range of Gellhorn the reporter beyond the battlefields — her eye trained on injustice at home and abroad.