Martha Gellhorn was an author that was born on November 1908 and she lived until the age of 89 when she died on February 15, 1998. Her career spanned 60 years, and she actually died by committing suicide since she felt useless after not being able to see any longer, and other illnesses. Apparently, she committed suicide by taking a drug overdose.
Martha was originally from St. Louis Missouri, and her parents were Edna Fischell and George Gellhorn. Her dad George was a doctor who practiced gynecology. There was a younger brother born to her parents as well namely Alfred Gellhorn. Her brother also became a doctor of oncology, and he lived to the ripe old age of 94, passing away in 2008. Her brother was once a dean at the University of Pennsylvania, a school for medicine.
Martha attended the John Burroughs School in St. Louis Missouri, and she graduated from there in 1926. After that, she went on to Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia Pennsylvania in the year of 1927. Martha didn’t stay to complete her degree there. Instead, she kept writing on her own as a journalist, and during 1930, she had some of her articles that were published in The New Republic. What Martha really wanted to do at this time, was to be a foreign correspondent. She then made the decision to travel to France, which she did, and worked at the United Press Bureau in Paris. During this time over there, her first book known as “What Mad Pursuit,” was published.
Some years later, during the Depression years, Martha came back to the US, and Harry Hopkins gave her a job to be an investigator for Federal Emergency Relief Administration. When Eleanor Roosevelt noticed her reports at the time, the two women formed a lifelong friendship. Martha wrote about what she discovered during this time, and these thoughts went into a short book called “The Trouble I’ve Seen.” That book was published in 1936.
In 1936 during the holiday season, Martha met Hemingway when she was vacationing in Florida. She and Hemingway took their travels to Spain, so they could get all of the needed information there about the Spanish civil War. Martha was expected to do this job for Collier’s Weekly. Martha and Hemingway, meant to be together,eventually did marry in 1940. Before this time period, the couple lived together off and on for a few years. Martha wasn’t faithful however, as there was infidelity involved, and she tended to fall for other men that were already married.
In the year of 1949, Martha apparently adopted a boy, but found after that, that her motherly instinct wasn’t very strong. Instead of caring for her son Sandy as she should have, she often left him with other family to be cared for many times. Because of this feeling of rejection she gave her son, the relationship went downhill, and became a resentful one.
I also found it very sad that Martha Gellhorn was an atheist. Her culture growing up was Jewish, and the only religious background she ever had was to attend the Society for Ethical Culture.
