Martha Ellis Gellhorn (8 November 1908 – 15 February 1998)[1] was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century.

[8] At age 7, Gellhorn participated in "The Golden Lane," a rally for women's suffrage at the Democratic Party's 1916 national convention in St. Louis.

[9] In 1926, Gellhorn graduated from John Burroughs School in St. Louis, and enrolled in Bryn Mawr College, several miles outside Philadelphia.

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.

Returning to the United States in 1932,[11] Gellhorn was hired by Harry Hopkins, whom she had met through her friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

[13] 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 had been hired to report for Collier's Weekly on the Spanish Civil War, and the pair decided to travel to Spain together.

[12] In June 1944, Gellhorn applied to the British government for press accreditation to report on the Normandy landings; her application, like those of all female journalists, was refused.

Lacking official press credentials, she drove to the south coast of England and, claiming to be a nurse, was allowed onto an American hospital ship about to depart for France.

Increasingly resentful of Gellhorn's 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?"

When she arrived by means of a dangerous ocean voyage in war-torn London (he had landed there eleven days before her, via an RAF flight on which she had arranged a seat for him), she told him she had had enough.

[23] 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.

[25] 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).

She left Sandy in the care of relatives in Englewood, New Jersey, for long periods as she travelled, and he eventually attended boarding school.

It long survived volatility on both sides and entailed much moral, creative and financial support for her friend on Gellhorn's part until she ended the friendship in the early 1980s.

Several of her prominent close friends (among them the actress Betsy Drake, journalist John Pilger, writer James Fox, and Martha's younger brother Alfred) have dismissed the characterizations of her as sexually manipulative and maternally deficient.

[35] In 2019, a blue English Heritage plaque was unveiled at Gellhorn's former London home, the first to feature the dedication of "war correspondent".

[36] In 2021 a Purple Plaque was placed on the cottage she lived in near Kilgwrrwg,[28] north-west of Chepstow, as part of a national effort to commemorate remarkable women.

[37] On 5 October 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 22 April 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.[38] 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.

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.

[41] In her collection of short stories called “Old babes in the wood”, Margaret Atwood briefly recalls Martha Gellhorn’s reporting from the Second World War, notably her article on the breaking through the Gothic Line and the capturing of the Fortunato Ridge in 1944.