Martha Gellhorn

American novelist Martha Ellis Gellhorn was born in St. Louis, MO, in 1908 to a well-to-do family. She traveled widely in Europe, where she met and married her first husband, a French journalist named Marquis Juvenel. In 1934 her first novel, "What Mad Pursuit", was published. She later worked on a newspaper in Albany, NY, and struck up an acquaintance with Harry Hopkins, who was in charge of the US government's Emergency Relief Administration, and he commissioned her to do a survey of people who were on relief in urban industrial areas. After she turned in the results of that survey, she used parts of it as the basis for her next novel, "The Trouble I've Seen", for which famed author H.G. Wells wrote the introduction. She was in Spain during the civil war in the late 1930s, covering it for a US magazine, when she met writer Ernest Hemingway. They became fast friends, and it was rumored that she was the inspiration for the lead character in his novel "The Fifth Column". Hemingway did dedicate his novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" to her, and in 1940, after Hemingway obtained a divorce from his second wife--Gellhorn was by this time divorced from her husband--he married her. She had been covering Czechoslovakia and Finland on assignment for "Collier's Weekly" magazine, and in 1941 she traveled to the Far East for the magazine (one of her journeys took her on the infamous Burma Road). Her novel "A Stricken Field", published in 1940, was about Czech refugees driven out of the country after it was taken over by Nazi Germany. The next year she published a book of short stories, "The Heart of Another", about the effects of the war on the people in Europe. Martha Gellhorn died of cancer Feb. l6, 1998, in London, England.