Martha Gellhorn

As Martha Gellhorn explains, "This book is a selection of articles written during six decades; peace-time reporting. That is to say, the countries in the background were at peace at the moment of writing; not that there was peace on earth." America during the Depression, Spain in the anxious aftermath of Franco's death, a Christmas with the have-nots in London and a weekend in Israel, the magnificent protests at the White House, a memoir of domestic...

Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998) was a war correspondent for nearly fifty years. From the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the wars in Central America in the mid-eighties, her candid reports reflected her feelings for people no matter what their political ideologies, and the openness and vulnerability of her conscience. "I wrote very fast, as I had to," she says, "afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special...

From Martha Gellhorn's critically acclaimed biographer, the first collected letters of this defining figure of the twentieth-century Martha Gellhorn's heroic career as a reporter brought her to the front lines of virtually every significant international conflict between the Spanish Civil War and the end of the Cold War. While Gellhorn's wartime dispatches rank among the best of the century, her personal letters are their equal: as vivid and fascinating...