Martha Gellhorn: A Life - Hardcover

Moorehead, Caroline

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701169516 ISBN 13: 9780701169510

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2003

Synopsis

Martha Gellhorn's reporting tracks many of the flashpoints of the 20th century: witnessing the Depression in a state of righteous fury, risking her life in the Spanish Civil War, and in the Second World War covering the fall of Czechoslovakia and the Normandy Landings, the liberation of Dachau and the Nuremberg Trials. She reported from Vietnam and Israel; and at the age of 81, she was covering the US invasion of Panama. All her life, Martha fought against injustice. She was influenced by two older women: her mother, who was a social reformer, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Her books of reporting and travel reflected her personality and courage, her novels her shrewd and ironic eye; both were often very funny. Martha died in 1998; at last the true story can be told. This fascinating book reveals much about her life and loves, and is based on primary source material which no previous biographer has seen.

About this title

Review:

"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)

From the Publisher:

Magnificent new biography of Martha Gellhorn, the war correspondent, whose fearless reporting from the front made her a legend, and whose private life was often messy and volcanic. Ernest Hemingway sent her a telegram: 'Are you a war correspondent or my w

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0701169516
• ISBN 13: 9780701169510
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560