Hemingway
Who was Martha Gellhorn 's spouse in Dec 1944?
Martha Gellhorn Martha Ellis Gellhorn ( November 8 , 1908 – February 15 , 1998 ) was an American novelist , travel writer , and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century . She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career . Gellhorn was also the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway , from 1940 to 1945 . She died in 1998 in an apparent suicide at the age of 89 , ill and almost completely blind . The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after her . Early life . Gellhorn was born on November 8 , 1908 , in St . Louis , Missouri , the daughter of Edna Fischel Gellhorn , a suffragist , and George Gellhorn , a German-born gynecologist . Her father and maternal grandfather were Jewish , and her maternal grandmother came from a Protestant family . Her brother Walter became a noted law professor at Columbia University , and her younger brother Alfred was an oncologist and former dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine . At age 7 , Gellhorn participated in The Golden Lane , a rally for womens suffrage at the Democratic Partys 1916 national convention in St . Louis . Women carrying yellow parasols and wearing yellow sashes lined both sides of a main street leading to the St . Louis Coliseum . A tableau of the states was in front of the Art Museum ; states that had not enfranchised women were draped in black . Gellhorn and another girl , Mary Taussig , stood in front of the line , representing future voters . In 1926 , Gellhorn graduated from John Burroughs School in St . Louis , and enrolled in Bryn Mawr College , several miles outside Philadelphia . The following year , she left without having graduated to pursue a career as a journalist . Her first published articles appeared in The New Republic . In 1930 , determined to become a foreign correspondent , she went to France for two years , where she worked at the United Press bureau in Paris , but was fired after she reported sexual harassment by a man connected with the agency . She spent years traveling Europe , writing for newspapers in Paris and St . Louis and covering fashion for Vogue . She became active in the pacifist movement , and wrote about her experiences in her 1934 book What Mad Pursuit . Returning to the United States in 1932 , Gellhorn was hired by Harry Hopkins , whom she had met through her friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt . The Roosevelts invited Gellhorn to live at the White House , and she spent evenings there helping Eleanor Roosevelt write correspondence and the first lady’s “My Day” column in Women’s Home Companion . She was hired as a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration ( FERA ) , created by Franklin D . Roosevelt to help end the Great Depression . Gellhorn traveled around the United States for FERA to report on how the Depression was affecting the country . She first went to Gastonia , North Carolina . Later , she worked with Dorothea Lange , a photographer , to document the everyday lives of the hungry and homeless . Their reports became part of the official government files for the Great Depression . They were able to investigate topics that were not usually open to women of the 1930s . She drew on her research to write a collection of short stories , The Trouble Ive Seen ( 1936 ) . In Idaho doing FERA work , Gellhorn convinced a group of workers to break the windows of the FERA office to draw attention to their crooked boss . Although this worked , she was fired from FERA . War in Europe and marriage to Hemingway . Gellhorn met Ernest Hemingway during a 1936 Christmas family trip to Key West , Florida . Gellhorn had been hired to report for Colliers Weekly on the Spanish Civil War , and the pair decided to travel to Spain together . They celebrated Christmas of 1937 in Barcelona . In Germany , she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler and in the spring of 1938 , months before the Munich Agreement , she was in Czechoslovakia . After the outbreak of World War II , she described these events in the novel A Stricken Field ( 1940 ) . She later reported the war from Finland , Hong Kong , Burma , Singapore , and England . Lacking official press credentials to witness the Normandy landings , she hid in a hospital ship bathroom , and upon landing impersonated a stretcher bearer ; she later recalled , I followed the war wherever I could reach it . She was the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day on June 6 , 1944 . She was also among the first journalists to report from Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated by US troops on April 29 , 1945 . Gellhorn and Hemingway lived together off and on for four years , before marrying in November 1940 . ( Hemingway had ostensibly lived with his second wife , Pauline Pfeiffer , until 1939 ) . Increasingly resentful of Gellhorns long absences during her reporting assignments , Hemingway wrote to her when she left their Finca Vigía estate near Havana in 1943 to cover the Italian Front : Are you a war correspondent , or wife in my bed ? Hemingway , however , would later go to the front just before the Normandy landings , and Gellhorn also went , with Hemingway trying to block her travel . When she arrived by means of a dangerous ocean voyage in war-torn London , she told him she had had enough . She had found , as had his other wives , that , as described by Bernice Kert in The Hemingway Women : Hemingway could never sustain a long-lived , wholly satisfying relationship with any one of his four wives . Married domesticity may have seemed to him the desirable culmination of romantic love , but sooner or later he became bored and restless , critical and bullying . After four contentious years of marriage , they divorced in 1945 . The 2012 film Hemingway & Gellhorn is based on these years . The 2011 documentary film No Job for a Woman : The Women Who Fought to Report WWII features Gellhorn and how she changed war reporting . Later career . After the war , Gellhorn worked for the Atlantic Monthly , covering the Vietnam War and the Arab-Israel conflicts in the 1960s and 70s . She passed her 70th birthday in 1979 , but continued working in the following decade , covering the civil wars in Central America . As she approached 80 , Gellhorn began to slow down physically and although she still managed to cover the U.S . invasion of Panama in 1989 , she finally retired from journalism as the 1990s began . An operation for cataracts was unsuccessful and left her with permanently impaired vision . Gellhorn announced that she was too old to cover the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s . She did manage one last overseas trip to Brazil in 1995 to report on poverty in that country , which was published in the literary journal Granta . This last feat was accomplished with great difficulty as Gellhorns eyesight was failing , and she could not read her own manuscripts . Gellhorn published numerous books , including a collection of articles on war , The Face of War ( 1959 ) ; The Lowest Trees Have Tops ( 1967 ) , a novel about McCarthyism ; an account of her travels ( including one trip with Hemingway ) , Travels with Myself and Another ( 1978 ) ; and a collection of her peacetime journalism , The View from the Ground ( 1988 ) . Peripatetic by nature , Gellhorn reckoned that in a 40-year span of her life , she had created homes in 19 different locales . Personal life . Gellhorns first major affair was with the French economist Bertrand de Jouvenel . It began in 1930 , when she was 22 years old , and lasted until 1934 . She would have married de Jouvenel if his wife had consented to a divorce . She met Ernest Hemingway in Key West , Florida , in 1936 . They married in 1940 . Gellhorn resented her reflected fame as Hemingways third wife , remarking that she had no intention of being a footnote in someone elses life . As a condition for granting interviews , she was known to insist that Hemingways name not be mentioned . As she put it once , Ive been a writer for over 40 years . I was a writer before I met him and I was a writer after I left him . Why should I be merely a footnote in his life ? While married to Hemingway , Gellhorn had an affair with U.S . paratrooper Major General James M . Gavin , commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division . Gavin was the youngest divisional commander in the U.S . army in World War II . Between marriages after divorcing Hemingway in 1945 , Gellhorn had romantic liaisons with L , Laurance Rockefeller , an American businessman ( 1945 ) ; journalist William Walton ( 1947 ) ( no relation to the British composer ) ; and medical doctor David Gurewitsch ( 1950 ) . In 1954 , she married the former managing editor of Time Magazine , T . S . Matthews . She and Matthews divorced in 1963 . She stayed in London for some time before moving to Kenya and then to Kilgwrrwg near Devauden in Gwent , south Wales , where she was very taken by the niceness of the Welsh people , before finally returning to London because of her ill-health . In 1949 , Gellhorn adopted a boy , Sandro , from an Italian orphanage . He was formally renamed George Alexander Gellhorn , and widely called Sandy . Gellhorn was reportedly a devoted mother for a time , but was not by nature maternal . She left Sandy in the care of relatives in Englewood , New Jersey , for long periods as she travelled , and he eventually attended boarding school . Their relationship was said to have become embittered . Gellhorn and the writer Sybille Bedford met in Rome in 1949 and developed a strong platonic friendship . It long survived volatility on both sides , and entailed much moral , creative and financial support for her friend on Gellhorns part until she ended the friendship in the early 1980s . Regarding sex , in 1972 Gellhorn wrote : If I practised sex out of moral conviction , that was one thing ; but to enjoy it .. . seemed a defeat . I accompanied men and was accompanied in action , in the extrovert part of life ; I plunged into that .. . but not sex ; that seemed to be their delight , and all I got was a pleasure of being wanted , I suppose , and the tenderness ( not nearly enough ) that a man gives when he is satisfied . I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents . On her relationship with Hemingway , she said My whole memory of sex with Ernest is the invention of excuses , and failing that , the hope that it would soon be over . However , the legacy of Gellhorns personal life remains shrouded in controversy . Supporters of Gellhorn say her unauthorized biographer , Carl Rollyson , is guilty of sexual scandal-mongering and cod psychology . Several of her prominent close friends ( among them the actress Betsy Drake , journalist John Pilger , writer James Fox , and Marthas younger brother Alfred ) have dismissed the characterizations of her as sexually manipulative and maternally deficient . Her supporters include her stepson , Sandy Matthews , who describes Gellhorn as very conscientious in her role as stepmother ; and Jack Hemingway once said that Gellhorn , his fathers third wife , was his favorite other mother . Death and legacy . In her last years , Gellhorn was in frail health , nearly blind and suffering from ovarian cancer that had spread to her liver . On February 15 , 1998 , she committed suicide in London apparently by swallowing a cyanide capsule . The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was established in 1999 in her honor . In 2019 , a blue English Heritage plaque was unveiled at Gellhorn’s former London home , the first to feature the dedication of war correspondent . In popular culture . On October 5 , 2007 , the United States Postal Service announced that it would honor five 20th-century journalists with first-class rate postage stamps , to be issued on April 22 , 2008 : Martha Gellhorn ; John Hersey ; George Polk ; Ruben Salazar ; and Eric Sevareid . Postmaster General Jack Potter announced the stamp series at the Associated Press Managing Editors Meeting in Washington , D.C . In 2011 , Gellhorn was the subject of an hour-long episode of the World Media Rights series Extraordinary Women , which airs on the BBC , and periodically in the United States on PBS . In 2012 , Gellhorn was played by Nicole Kidman in Philip Kaufmans film , Hemingway & Gellhorn . Martha Gellhorns relationship with Ernest Hemingway is the subject of Paula McLains 2018 novel , Love and Ruin . In April , 2021 , Hemingway , a three-episode , six-hour documentary recapitulation of Hemingways life , labors , and loves , debuted on the Public Broadcasting System . It was co-produced and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick . It contains considerable footage and photographs of Gellhorn , who is voiced by Meryl Streep , and recollections of those who knew her and her life with Hemingway first-hand . Bibliography . - What Mad Pursuit ( 1934 ) her time as a pacifist ; - The Trouble Ive Seen ( 1936 , new edition by Eland , 2012 ) Depression-era set of short stories ; - A Stricken Field ( 1940 ) novel set in Czechoslovakia at the outbreak of war ; - The Heart of Another ( 1941 ) ; - Liana ( 1944 ) ; - The Undefeated ( 1945 ) ; - Love Goes to Press : A Comedy in Three Acts ( 1947 ) ( with Virginia Cowles ) ; - The Wine of Astonishment ( 1948 ) World War II novel , republished in 1989 as Point of No Return ; - The Honeyed Peace : Stories ( 1953 ) ; - Two by Two ( 1958 ) ; - The Face of War ( 1959 ) collection of war journalism , updated in 1993 ; - His Own Man ( 1961 ) ; - Pretty Tales for Tired People ( 1965 ) ; - Vietnam : A New Kind of War ( 1966 ) ; - The Lowest Trees Have Tops ( 1967 ) a novel ; - Travels with Myself and Another : A Memoir ( 1978 , new edition by Eland , 2002 ) ; - The Weather in Africa ( 1978 , new edition by Eland , 2006 ) ; - The View From the Ground ( 1989 ; new edition by Eland , 2016 ) , a collection of peacetime journalism ; - The Short Novels of Martha Gellhorn ( 1991 ) ; US edition being The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn ( 1993 ) - Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn ( 2006 ) , edited by Caroline Moorehead ; - Yours , for Probably Always : Martha Gellhorns Letters of Love and War 1930–1949 ( 2019 ) , edited by Janet Somerville . Books about Gellhorn . - Somerville , Janet ( 2019 ) Yours , for Probably Always : Martha Gellhorns Letters of Love and WarAmazon link - Clayton , Meg Waite ( 2018 ) Beautiful Exiles : A Novel - Hardy Dorman , Angelia ( 2012 ) . Martha Gellhorn : Myth , Motif and Remembrance . - ( a.k.a . Gellhorn : A Twentieth-Century Life ) References . Notes Sources ( re-published as Gellhorn : A 20th-Century Life , Henry Holt & Co. , New York ( 2003 ) ) Further reading . - OToole , Fintan , A Moral Witness ( review of Janet Somerville , ed. , Yours , for Probably Always : Martha Gellhorns Letters of Love and War , 1930–1949 , Firefly , 528 pp. ) , The New York Review of Books , vol . LXVII , no . 15 ( 8 October 2020 ) , pp . 29–31 . Fintan OToole writes ( p . 31 ) : Her [ war ] dispatches were not first drafts of history ; they were letters from eternity . [ ... ] To see history – at least the history of war – in terms of people is to see it not as a linear process but as a series of terrible repetitions [ ... ] . It is her ability to capture [ ... ] the terrible futility of this sameness that makes Gellhorns reportage so genuinely timeless . [ W ] e are [ ... ] drawn [ ... ] into the undertow of her distraught awareness that this moment , in its essence , has happened before and will happen again . External links . - Review of Martha Gellhorn : A Life ( The Age ) - <a Gellhorn talks about the Spanish Civil War </a> ( from a BBC Radio 4 live stream ) . - Electric Sky – Martha Gellhorn – On The Record - Is There a New Germany? , Martha Gellhorn , The Atlantic Monthly , February 1964 - The Arabs of Palestine , from Martha Gellhorn - The Outsiders : Martha Gellhorn a 1983 interview by John Pilge