Martha Gellhorn: A Life

Description

Martha Gellhorn was a fearless reporter and her despatches from the front made her a legend, yet her private life was often messy and volcanic. Her determination to be a war correspondent - and her conspicuous success - contributed to the breakdown of her already stormy marriage to Ernest Hemingway. Gellhorn's journalism tracks many of the flashpoints of the twentieth century; as a young woman she witnessed the suffering of the American Depression and risked her life in the Spanish Civil War, whilst producing some of her finest writing. All her life, Martha's battles were fought against injustice, and she always captured the human story.

Caroline Moorehead is the biographer of Bertrand Russell, Freya Stark, Iris Origo and Martha Gellhorn. Well known for her work in human rights, she has published a history of the Red Cross and a book about refugees, Human Cargo. Her book, Dancing to the Precipice, a biography of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, was shorlisted for the Costa Biography Award in 2009. Caroline lives in London.

Gellhorn is a superb subject for biography. Caroline Moorehead has seized the opportunity with an elan that her subject would have admired. The result is an adventure story which, true to the genre, has moments of both triumph and tragedy * Independent on Sunday * As one would expect from a writer of Caroline Moorehead's diligence and acuity, this is an extremely thorough, colourful and pacy biography * Sunday Telegraph * An enthralling biography - with an unflinching honesty Martha would have approved of * Daily Mail * Superbly crafted, engaging and engaged... Martha Gellhorn leaps off the page-marvellous * Literary Review * Not often does a biography make you against the odds fall headlong for its heroine...but Caroline Moorehead's exemplary and exciting account of the Hemingway wife who reported the war like it was sweeps you incisively into a broad-based history of the last century through the eyes of two women, author and subject, each as brilliant as the other but sharply differing in temperament -- David Hughes * Spectator *