Martha Gellhorn

2012-07-29T08:14:00.001-07:00

Available at Amazon.com

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Martha Gellhorn: Myth, Motif and Remembrance

Martha Gellhorn remains one of the most fascinating characters of the 20th century. As a journalist, she crossed oceans and continents to get to the story. She braved war fronts, and challenged and broke the boundaries set for women journalist. From Madrid to Nuremberg, she produced some of the finest documentary journalism of the century. Her war dispatches from the European Theater of Operations (ETO) in World War II are unmatched in their accuracy, consistency and poignancy.

This study is a new take on the Gellhorn legacy and a look at the basic values, themes and motifs which permeated all of her writing. Gellhorn’s life and work are examined in terms of the way she was remembered by her contemporaries and the way she is viewed today in popular culture and her legacy. This is all presented without hype or hyperbole.

The book moves chronologically through Gellhorn's career. Her efforts as a novelist and writer of fiction are examined, but the primary focus of this work is on Gellhorn as a writer of non-fiction. There is a strong focus on her early journalistic experiences and her work with the Federal Emergency Relief Agency (FERA) and their influence on her development as a writer. This biography further explores Gellhorn’s maturation process and her emergence as one of the preeminent war correspondents of the century. While there is no way to ignore her connection to Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn clearly emerges from his shadow in this work.

Martha Gellhorn: Myth, Motif and Remembrance is a fresh new look at the legacy of Gellhorn. If there is one book to read to understand the historical and critical importance of Gellhorn, this is it.

Jacqueline Elizabeth Orsagh author of the seminal work on Gellhorn notes:

Utilizing her background in American history, Angelia Dorman brings to her biography of Martha Gellhorn a perspective that adds substantially to the scholarship on the feminist war correspondent. She shows Gellhorn’s career and motivating philosophy to be a product of the Progressive Era and of Theodore Roosevelt’s endorsement of the muckraking tradition. At the same time, Dorman highlights Gellhorn’s attempt, whether conscious or unconscious, to participate in her own mythmaking. An important read for Gellhorn fans and aficionados.

Elizabeth McIntosh author of Sisterhood of Spies calls it:

Well researched, well written ... a refreshing new take on Gellhorn...

Kindle download also available.

Martha Gellhorn in Czechoslovakia

2012-06-04T13:18:00.001-07:00

Gellhorn became a war correspondent in Spain in 1937 and 1938. After Spain, Gellhorn did the only non-war reporting she would do for Collier's. She toured war preparations in England, France and also made trips to Czechoslovakia during the period of the Czech Crisis.

A French Conscience in Prague: Louis Eugene Faucher and the Abandonment of Czechoslovakia

By Richard Francis Crane, Ph.D.

The Czech Crisis was far more complicated than young Martha Gellhorn's view of the situation. Professor Crane covers the complexities of the Crisis. He uses General Faucher's central role in dealing with French foreign policy decisions to inform the reader of the complexities involved in the subsequent decisions. Faucher was fictionalized in Gellhorn's novel, A Stricken Field as the character General Labonne.

Gellhorn's Collier's Articles from Czechoslovakia
(Courtesy of unz.org)

Come Ahead, Adolf! by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 12-13 - PDF
Czechoslovakia bars the awy
Collier's Weekly, August 6, 1938

Obituary of a Democracy by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 12-13 - PDF
What's happening to the people of Czechoslovakia
Collier's Weekly, December 10, 1938

Articles from England and France

The Lord Will Provide---for England by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 15-17 - PDF
With a bit of help from cautious Britishers
Collier's Weekly, September 17, 1938

Guns Against France by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 14-15 - PDF
Citizens of the republic prepare for war
Collier's Weekly, October 8, 1938

Martha Gellhorn: Myth, Motif and Remembrance
by
Angelia Hardy Dorman
Available at Amazon.com
Kindle download and preview also available

Martha Gellhorn: Myth, Motif and Remembrance

2012-05-12T08:49:00.001-07:00

Available at Amazon.com

Martha Gellhorn: Myth, Motif and Remembrance
by
Angelia Hardy Dorman
Available at Amazon.com
Kindle download and preview also available

Elizabeth McIntosh author of Sisterhood of Spies calls it:

Well researched, well written ... a refreshing new take on Gellhorn...

Available at Amazon.com

Martha Gellhorn: Myth, Motif and Remembrance

Kindle download also available.

Gellhorn's Collier's Articles

2012-05-12T08:42:00.001-07:00

UNZ.org is best place to find Gellhorn's work from Collier's free on the web

For an analysis of Gellhorn's career and life:

Add caption

Martha Gellhorn: Myth, Motif and Remembrance

Kindle download also available.

Dachau: Experimental Murder by Martha Gellhorn, p. 16 - PDF
In the name of science the Germans planned horror which, even to those who witness....
Collier's Weekly, June 23, 1945

The finest single piece of writing from Gellhorn's career was Dachau and if you want to really get a feel for her writing and her voice and only have time to read one article, read Dachau.

Other Selected Articles available via unz.org

Gellhorn in Spain with Robert Merriman, the model for Hemingway's Robert Jordan

Only the Shells Whine by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 12-13 - PDF
Siege in Madrid
Collier's Weekly, July 17, 1937

Men Without Medals by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 9-10 - PDF
Americans at the Spanish Front
Collier's Weekly, January 15, 1938

City at War by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 18-19 - PDF
Life goes on in Madrid
Collier's Weekly, April 2, 1938

Come Ahead, Adolf! by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 12-13 - PDF
Czechoslovakia bars the way
Collier's Weekly, August 6, 1938

Obituary of a Democracy by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 12-13 - PDF
What's happening to the people of Czechoslovakia
Collier's Weekly, December 10, 1938

Slow Boat to War by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 10-12 - PDF
Dodging disaster in the North Sea
Collier's Weekly, January 6, 1940

Bombs from a Low Sky by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 12-13 - PDF
Why the Finns are getting angry
Collier's Weekly, January 27, 1940

Fear Comes to Sweden by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 20-22 - PDF
A nation prepares for the worst
Collier's Weekly, February 3, 1940

Death in the Present Tense by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 14-15 - PDF
Finland faces its trial
Collier's Weekly, February 10, 1940

Gellhorn and Hemingway in Hawaii on their way to the Far East (1941)

Flight Into Peril by Martha Gellhorn, p. 21 - PDF

China's life line in the air
Collier's Weekly, May 31, 1941

These, Our Mountains by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 16-17 - PDF
A trip to China's fighting front
Collier's Weekly, June 28, 1941

Her Day by Martha Gellhorn, p. 16 - PDF
Madame Chiang Kai-shek, China's indispensable woman
Collier's Weekly, August 30, 1941

Three Poles by Martha Gellhorn, p. 17 - PDF
Poland waits and the German fury turns to fear
Collier's Weekly, March 18, 1944

Visit Italy by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 62-69 - PDF
True to the spirit of France, her patriots are fighting and dying in the Italian...
Collier's Weekly, May 6, 1944

Men Made Over by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 32-45 - PDF
Workers in R.A.F. burn centers rebuild hands and faces---and the spirit
Collier's Weekly, May 20, 1944

The D-Day Articles

Hangdog Herrenvolk by Martha Gellhorn, p. 24 - PDF
In the cold light of capture, Germany's "superman" looks pretty sick
Collier's Weekly, July 29, 1944

The Wounded Come Home by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 14-15 - PDF
Under the sign of the red cross, the white ship returns to London with its preci...
Collier's Weekly, August 5, 1944

The Wounds of Paris by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 72-75 - PDF

Prisons, torture chambers, unmarked graves---scars never to be healed
Collier's Weekly, November 4, 1944

Rough and Tumble by Martha Gellhorn, p. 12 - PDF
The 82nd Airborne Division battles on with style and without complaint
Collier's Weekly, December 2, 1944

Night Life in the Sky by Martha Gellhorn, pp. 18-19 - PDF
First girl correspondent to go on a combat mission over Germany describes what i...
Collier's Weekly, March 17, 1945

Dachau: Experimental Murder by Martha Gellhorn, p. 16 - PDF
In the name of science the Germans planned horror which, even to those who witness...
Collier's Weekly, June 23, 1945

Available at Amazon.com

Martha Gellhorn: Myth, Motif and Remembrance

Kindle download also available.

Marie Colvin on Martha Gellhorn

2012-05-12T08:37:00.000-07:00

Marie Colvin on Martha Gellhorn (February 2012)

Completed only weeks before her death, Marie Colvin looks a the importance of Martha Gellhorn.


The Face of War available at Amazon.com

Martha Gellhorn: Myth, Motif and Remembrance
by
Angelia Hardy Dorman
Available at Amazon.com
Kindle download and preview also available

Gellhorn Interview 1983

2012-05-12T08:34:00.001-07:00

John Pilger Interviews Martha Gellhorn 1983

Martha Gellhorn: Myth, Motif and Remembrance
by
Angelia Hardy Dorman
Available at Amazon.com
Kindle download and preview also available

BBC Radio 4 Interviews with Martha Gellhorn

2012-05-06T17:23:00.001-07:00

BBC Radio Interviews with Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn: Myth, Motif and Remembrance
by
Angelia Hardy Dorman
Available at Amazon.com
Kindle download and preview also available

The New York Times Obituary

2010-07-26T08:45:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
February 17, 1998
Martha Gellhorn, Daring Writer, Dies at 89
By RICK LYMAN
Martha Ellis Gellhorn, who as one of the first female war correspondents covered a dozen major conflicts in a writing career spanning more than six decades, died on Sunday at her home in London. She was 89.

Ms. Gellhorn was a cocky, raspy-voiced maverick who saw herself as a champion of ordinary people trapped in conflicts created by the rich and powerful. That she was known to many largely because of her marriage to Ernest Hemingway, from1940 to 1945, caused her unending irritation, especially when critics tried to find parallels between her lean writing style and
that of her more celebrated husband.

''Why should I be a footnote to somebody else's life?'' she bitterly asked in an interview, pointing out that she had written two novels before meeting Hemingway and continued writing for almost a half-century after leaving him.

As a journalist, Ms. Gellhorn had no use for the notion of objectivity. The chief point of going to cover anything, she felt, was so you could tell what you saw, contradict the lies and let the bad guys have it. ''You go into a hospital, and it's full of wounded kids,'' she once said. ''So you write what you see and how it is. You don't say there's 37 wounded children in this hospital, but maybe there's 38 wounded children on the other side. You write what you
see.''

Though best known for her groundbreaking journalism, Ms. Gellhorn was also an accomplished fiction writer, author of 5 novels, 14 novellas and 2 collections of short stories, many of which were based on people and incidents she encountered during her prodigious travels.

Fresh out of Bryn Mawr College in 1927, she began writing for The New Republic, then became a crime reporter for a local newspaper in Albany. Ms. Gellhorn got to Europe by writing a brochure for the Holland American Line and traveled throughout the continent. Later, she met Harry Hopkins, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's confidant, and talked her way into
a job with the New Deal, wandering America and writing about the effects of the Depression on ordinary people.

She went to Spain in 1937 with nothing but a knapsack and $50, covered the conflict for Collier's Weekly and became Hemingway's lover. ''In Barcelona, it was perfect bombing weather,'' she wrote in a typical dispatch in 1938. ''The cafes along the Ramblas were crowded. There was nothing much to drink; a sweet fizzy poison called orangeade and a horrible liquid supposed to be sherry. There was, of course, nothing to eat. Everyone was out enjoying the cold afternoon sunlight. No bombers had come over for at least two hours.''

She covered the blitz in London. On D-Day, she stowed away on a hospital ship and snuck ashore as a stretcher bearer. She got British pilots to let her ride along on night bombing raids over Germany. When the Allies liberated Dachau, she was there to write about it.
''Behind the barbed wire and the electric fence,'' she wrote of her visit to Dachau, ''the skeletons sat in the sun and searched themselves for lice. They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky.''

She covered Russia's war against Finland in 1939, trekked across China with Hemingway in 1940, and became increasingly critical of the United States, which she saw as a ''colonial power,'' eventually settling abroad for good. She covered Vietnam, Nicaraguan contras, the Arab-Israeli conflict and, at the age of 81, the United States invasion of Panama. It was only when war came to Bosnia that she gave it a pass.

''Too old,'' she said. ''You have to be nimble for war.''

Ms. Gellhorn's war correspondence was collected in ''The Face of War'' in 1959. She always focused on ordinary foot soldiers and civilians, ignoring the generals. Her peacetime journalism was collected in ''The View From the Ground'' in 1988. Among her novels were ''A Stricken Field'' (1940), set among refugees in Prague just before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, and ''Liana'' (1944), about the marriage of a mulatto woman and a rich white man in the French Caribbean.

Many reviewers felt Ms. Gellhorn was even more successful as a writer of novellas, and she was highly praised for ''The Weather in Africa'' (1988), three novellas set on that continent, and ''The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn'' (1993). Ms. Gellhorn sometimes took criticism from political conservatives, who painted her as a left-leaning dilettante whose writing was often didactic and sentimental. Others criticized her vivid journalism as being, stylistically, too much like fiction and her terse fiction as being, stylistically, too much like journalism.

But her longevity and the compelling pull of her life story overrode such criticisms. A heroine to generations of young women correspondents for her fight to get equal treatment and a place on the front lines with male colleagues, she was also a romantic figure for her wartime relationship with one of the century's most famous writers and her subsequent rejection of him.

Ms. Gellhorn's father was a doctor in St. Louis with progressive notions and her mother, whom she adored, was a suffragist and social reformer who sometimes took her daughter with her to rallies and protests. Her father pulled her out of a convent school when he discovered the nuns were teaching female anatomy with a textbook that had its pictures covered and transferred the girl to a progressive coeducational school of which her mother was a co-founder.

Later, at Bryn Mawr, Ms. Gellhorn changed her major from English to French, which became useful for her journalistic work in Europe. In 1934, she was among a group of American students invited to tour Nazi Germany, and she never forgot her first encounter with Fascism.

When she returned to the United States and was working for the Federal Emergency Relief
Administration, she befriended Eleanor Roosevelt and spent some time, as the First Lady's guest, at the White House. She also wrote a collection of novellas about it, ''The Trouble I've Seen'' (1936).

Her first marriage, in 1933 to Bertrand de Jouvenel, a French pacifist who was the son-in-law of the novelist Colette, ended in divorce. In 1936, she wandered into a bar in Key West, Fla., and met Hemingway. They drank, became friends and, the next year, when she showed up in Madrid, she picked up again with Hemingway and other war correspondents. She married the author in 1940, becoming his third wife.

They traveled and worked together, living between conflicts at a villa in Cuba. In 1945, Ms. Gellhorn left Hemingway,walking out after an argument at London's Dorchester Hotel. She was the only one of Hemingway's wives to leave him, and he never forgave her. ''His hatred of her was a terrible thing to see,'' one Hemingway biographer noted. She left, she said,because he was jealous and bullying.

Ms. Gellhorn's third marriage, to T. S. Matthews, an editor at Time magazine, also ended in divorce. She said she just found married life too boring.

After World War II, Ms. Gellhorn adopted a son in Italy and raised him, largely on her own, in Mexico and other countries, where she supported herself with a string of articles for women's magazines.

She is survived by her son, George Alexander Gellhorn of London, and a brother, Alfred Gellhorn of New York.

Ms. Gellhorn had decided that she could no longer live in the United States, and moved from Cuba to Italy to Mexico to Kenya until finally settling in Britain, where she spent her last 15 years shuttling between a small cottage in Wales, an apartment in London and the world's trouble spots. Her South Kensington apartment became a kind of salon for writers and
foreign correspondents.

Bill Buford, the fiction editor at The New Yorker who was previously the editor of Granta, an English literary magazine, wrote about Ms. Gellhorn and her work: ''Reading Martha Gellhorn for the first time is a staggering experience. She is not a travel writer or a journalist or a novelist. She is all of these, and one of the most eloquent witnesses of the 20th century.''

She also wrote a highly regarded travel book in 1979, ''Travels With Myself and Another,'' that was an often humorous recounting of some of her more uncomfortable jaunts to remote corners of the globe, some with Hemingway, whom she referred to only as Unwilling Companion.

Her first love continued to be a crusading brand of nonfiction. ''Journalism is education for me,'' she wrote. ''Writing is payment for the chance to look and learn.'' She wrote on an old, battered typewriter and had to quit in 1992 when a cataract operation left her with diminished eyesight.
She could no longer see the keys and felt she was too old to learn how to dictate.

But she never lost her bite. She chain-smoked, drank and ate what she pleased. ''It bores me, all that health stuff,'' she said. She told one woman who came to interview her late in life that she had to stop. ''This conversation is so boring I think I'm going to faint,'' she said.

Ms. Gellhorn had little use for most war reporting after the Vietnam War, saying that the press' role in ending that conflict had taught military leaders a lesson. ''They realized the power of the press and have been controlling it ever since,'' she said. ''Look at the Gulf War. If you wanted
to go out and say to a soldier, 'How is it, kid?,' you had to bring a minder so the kid says nothing.
''It seems to me that they feed war reporters at these ridiculous briefings in the ballroom of hotels miles from anywhere.'' The public, she said, needs to realize that it is not getting the full story.

Looking back on a life that was colorful enough for any novel or reportage, Ms. Gellhorn once confessed: ''I'm overprivileged. I've had a wonderful life. I didn't deserve it but I've had it.''

Martha Gellhorn: Myth, Motif and Remembrance
by
Angelia Hardy Dorman
Available at Amazon.com
Kindle download and preview also available

Milt Wolff -- Obit

2010-07-26T08:36:00.001-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/obituaries/17wolff.html
Obituaries
Milton Wolff, 92, Dies; Anti-Franco Leader
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: January 17, 2008
Mr. Wolff was the last commander of the American volunteers who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

PBS Reporting America at War

2010-07-24T08:26:00.001-07:00

http://www.pbs.org/weta/reportingamericaatwar/reporters/gellhorn/

BBC Obituary, February 1998

2010-07-17T18:01:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/57316.stm

The link referencing my webpage no longer works, but it can still be accessed by the link here on the right.

The Press: New Editor for Collier's

2010-07-05T21:00:00.000-07:00

The Press: New Editor for Collier's

"Collier's got a new editor last week. To succeed the late Charles Colebaugh, a Collier's man for 27 years who died last week, Publisher William Ludlow Chenery chose a comparative newcomer: 42-year-old Henry La Cossitt." 5/22/44

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,796655,00.html#ixzz0ss6OfERX

Nicole Kidman signs on to another boho bio with HBO's 'Hemingway & Gellhorn'

2010-06-20T16:02:00.000-07:00

Nicole Kidman signs on to another boho bio with HBO's 'Hemingway & Gellhorn'