Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn's peacetime dispatches bear witness to six decades of change: America in the Great Depression, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia, young Poles undaunted by their Communist government, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Spain in the days after Franco's death, Cuba revisited after forty-one years. Here is history as it looked and felt to the people who lived through it. Intense, courageous and vividly readable, The View from the Ground is a remarkable act of testimony. With a new introduction by Sam Knight, author of The Premonitions Bureau.

I kölvattnet efter börskraschen 1929 kastades USA in i den stora depressionen. Miljontals amerikaner förlorade sin försörjning, sina hem, sin tro på både människan och Gud. I fyra sammanlänkade historier berättar Martha Gellhorn vad arbetslöshet, fattigdom och hopplöshet gör med människor. Allt lidande jag sett (1936), Martha Gellhorns genombrott som författare, är en modern amerikansk klassiker. Med journalistisk precision och en prosa som bultar av empati och vrede levandegör Gellhorn människorna i en epok som kastar skuggor ända in i vår tid.Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) var en av förra seklets mest omhuldade krigskorrespondenter och författare till fem romaner, fjorton kortromaner och två novellsamlingar. Hon var under en kort tid gift med Ernest Hemingway och den ende av dennes fruar som lämnade honom, vilket hon dessutom gjorde med de bevingade orden "jag vägrar vara en fotnot i någon annans liv".Allt lidande jag sett har aldrig tidigare utgivits på svenska och är den första av Sjösala förlags planerade nyöversättningar av Martha Gellhorns samlade verk."Allt lidande jag sett skrevs på uppdrag av paret Roosevelt. Texterna blir aldrig kletiga, lättköpta eller övertydliga. De är bara mycket konkreta och man känner andetagen och utsattheten, stoltheten och moralen utan att det blir moralistiskt. Martha Gellhorn ser alla dem hon skildrar i ögonhöjd - så att också vi som läser känner oss sedda." - Stig Hansén, Sydsvenskan

Martha Gellhorn was a fearless war correspondent for nearly fifty years and a leading journalistic voice of her generation. From the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the wars in Central America in the mid-eighties, her candid reporting reflected her deep empathy for people no matter their political ideology, and the openness and vulnerability of her conscience. "I wrote very fast, as I had to," she says, "afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place." Whether in Java, Finland, the Middle East, or Vietnam, she used the same vigorous approach. Collecting the best of Gellhorn's pieces on foreign conflicts and now with a new introduction by Lauren Elkin, The Face of War is what the New York Times called "a brilliant anti-war book" and has become a classic.

James Cameron admired Martha Gellhorn above all other war-reporters 'because she combined a cold eye with a warm heart'. The Chicago Times described her writing as 'wide ranging and provocative, a blend of cool lyricism and fiery emotion, alternately prickly and welcoming, funny and stern'. But make your own judgements, and in the process find yourself plunged straight back into Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, feel the frozen ground of the Finno Russian war, the continent-wide Japanese invasion of China, the massacres in Java, the murderously naive intervention in Vietnam and the USA's dirty little wars in Central America. You will also experience the process of the Second World War by the seat of your pants. It is a tough way to learn history, but also one created in bite-sized chunks, that inspire just as often as they shock.

If you want to know about writing, about how to make others share the horror and intensity of an experience, try the first piece in this collection, Justice at Night. Martha Gellhorn wrote it as a 28-year-old, having just returned home to the States after four years in Europe, in 1936. What follows is a selection of fifty years of peacetime journalism, history caught at the moment of its unfolding, as it looked and felt to those who experienced it. It's about revolutions in the making, guilty acts of state terrorism, poverty, injustice and recovery. It vividly captures the range and intensity of Gellhorn's courageous work and is also a passionate call to arms, not only to remember the wronged and to bear witness to evil, but to stand your ground in the face of it.

Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) was a war correspondent for nearly 50 years. From the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the wars in Central America in the mid-'80s, her candid reports reflected her feelings for people no matter what their political ideologies, and the openness and vulnerability of her conscience. "I wrote very fast, as I had to," she says, "afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place." Whether in Java, Finland, the Middle East, or Vietnam, she used the same vigorous approach. Collected here together for the first time, The Face of War is what The New York Times called "a brilliant anti-war book."

Martha was the youngest of sixteen, handpicked reporters who filed accurate, confidential reports on the human stories behind the statistics of the Depression directly to Roosevelt's White House. From these pages, we understand the real cost of sudden destitution on a vast scale. We taste the dust in the mouth, smell the disease and feel the hopelessness and the despair. And here, too, we can hear the earliest cadences of a writer who went on to become, arguably, the greatest female war reporter of the 20th century.

Martha Gellhorn was one of the first - and most widely read - female war correspondents of the twentieth century. She is best known for her fearless reporting in Europe before and during World War II and for her brief marriage to Ernest Hemingway, but she was also an acclaimed novelist. In 1938, before the Munich pact, Gellhorn visited Prague and witnessed its transformation from a proud democracy preparing to battle Hitler to a country occupied by the German army. Born out of this experience, "A Stricken Field" follows a journalist who returns to Prague after its annexation and finds her efforts to obtain help for the refugees and to convey the shocking state of the country both frustrating and futile. A convincing account of a people under the brutal oppression of the Gestapo, "A Stricken Field" is Gellhorn's most powerful work of fiction.

Written in the aftermath of World War II, Love Goes to Press opened in London in 1946 and on Broadway in 1947. At the time a relief for the survivors of Blitzkrieg and ration cards, today it is a devilishly entertaining portrayal of the Battle of the Sexes. In this romantic farce, set in a press camp on the Italian front in 1944, two women war correspondents—smart, sexy, and famous for scooping their male competitors—struggle to balance their professional lives with their love lives. The American literary tradition is replete with stories of "men without women," but in Love Goes to Press Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles have created a world of "women without men." Complications ensue when one of our heroines unexpectedly encounters her ex-husband, a famous writer whom she had divorced on the grounds of plagiarism. This Bison Books edition features a preface and an updated afterword by Sandra Spanier discussing her recent archival discoveries, her experience of working with Gellhorn to publish the play for the first time, and the strong resemblance of the leading man to Gellhorn's ex-husband, Ernest Hemingway.

Vier Paare, vier Novellen, ein Versprechen: In guten wie in schlechten Tagen, In Reichtum und Armut, In Gesundheit und Krankheit, Bis der Tod uns scheide. Martha Gellhorn lotet in vier ironisch eleganten, zutiefst berührenden Novellen Varianten von Paarbeziehungen aus. Eine junge Amerikanerin in Italien beobachtet an ihrem hochblütigen Prinzen späte Anzeichen von Selbständigkeit, die Gesellschaftslöwin treibt ihre lethargischen Männer zu immer neuen karrieristischen Höhenflügen, die ewig Kranke tyrannisiert Umwelt und Ehemann, und der rastlose Kriegsphotograph gibt auch im Tod das Geheimnis seiner großen Liebe nicht preis

Martha Gellhorn's three intertwined novellas are concerned with the integration of European outsider into the dramatic landscape of East Africa. It is a story of rejection and enchantment. Two sisters, one beautiful, one plain, return unmarried from their adventures in the great to their parents' hotel on the mountain, where they are caught up in a scandalous relations with an African official and an English botanist. A heartbroken woman tries to escape the memory of her son's death on a doomed holiday by the sea. A lonely, awkward young Englishman, disorientated by years as a prisoner-of-war, orphaned by bombs in London, seeks a new life in the highlands.

Out of a lifetime of travelling, Martha Gellhorn has selected her "best horror journeys". She bumps through rain-sodden, war-torn China to meet Chiang Kai-Shek, floats listlessly in search of u-boats in the wartime Caribbean and visits a dissident writer in the Soviet Union against her better judgement. Written with the eye of a novelist and an ironic black humour, what makes these tales irresistible are Gellhorn's explosive and often surprising reactions. Indignant, but never righteous and not always right, through the crucible of hell on earth emerges a woman who makes you laugh with her at life, while thanking God that you are not with her.

"Martha Gellhorn was so fearless in a male way, and yet utterly capable of making men melt," writes New Yorker literary editor Bill Buford. As a journalist, Gellhorn covered every military conflict from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and Nicaragua. She also bewitched Eleanor Roosevelt's secret love and enraptured Ernest Hemingway with her courage as they dodged shell fire together. Hemingway is, of course, the unnamed "other" in the title of this tart memoir, first published in 1979, in which Gellhorn describes her globe-spanning adventures, both accompanied and alone. With razor-sharp humor and exceptional insight into place and character, she tells of a tense week spent among dissidents in Moscow; long days whiled away in a disused water tank with hippies clustered at Eilat on the Red Sea; and her journeys by sampan and horse to the interior of China during the Sino-Japanese War. Now including a foreward by Bill Buford and photographs of Gellhorn with Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Gary Cooper, and others, this new edition rediscovers the voice of an extraordinary woman and brings back into print an irresistibly entertaining classic.

Martha Gellhorn's peacetime dispatches bear witness to six decades of change: America in the Great Depression, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia, young Poles undaunted by their Communist government, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Spain in the days after Franco's death, Cuba revisited after forty-one years. Here is history as it looked and felt to the people who lived through it. Intense, courageous and vividly readable, The View from the Ground is a remarkable act of testimony.

Martha Gellhorn was one of the twentieth century's greatest war correspondents. The Face of War is a selection of her reports, on the conflicts in Spain, Finland, China and World War II, with later reports on Vietnam, Israel and Central America.

Originally published in 1948, this powerful novel follows a U.S. Army infantry battalion in Europe through the last months of the Second World War—through the Battle of the Bulge, the Allied sweep across Germany, and the discovery of the Nazi death camps. Jacob Levy, a young soldier from St. Louis, has never given much thought to politics, world affairs, or his own Jewish heritage, but after the liberation of Dachau, he confronts the horror of the Holocaust and takes his own violent revenge. Jolted into a new understanding of humanity’s connectedness, he comes to terms with his own Jewish identity and grapples with questions of individual moral responsibility that are still contemporary fifty years later. In her afterword, Martha Gellhorn traces the roots of the novel in her own experience as a war correspondent who first heard of the Nazi concentration camps during the Spanish Civil War and herself got to Dachau a week after American soldiers discovered the camp at the end of a village street.