Abby Connolly
Ernest Hemingway was one of America’s most recognized authors and is still very well-known today for his novels and short stories.
However, his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, was also an extraordinary person, novelist, travel writer, and war correspondent who deserves more credit for all her work.
Martha was born in Missouri in 1908. She was very passionate about activism at a young age, beginning by supporting the women’s suffrage movement in the 1910s. As she got older and graduated from high school, Martha realized she wanted to become a journalist, specifically a foreign correspondent.
In the late 1920s, Martha began traveling around Europe and wrote travel pieces for newspapers. Martha even wrote some fashion pieces for Vogue magazine. When she returned to America in the 1930s, she befriended First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She began assisting her at the White House, helping her with her column for the magazine, “Woman’s Home Companion.”
Through her connections to Eleanor, Martha began working as a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, reporting on how the Great Depression affected Americans’ everyday lives.
Then, in 1936, she met Ernest Hemingway on a vacation in Key West, Florida, with her family. She was 28 years old, and he was 39. She was a big admirer of his since her early 20s.
Not long after they met, Martha was called to cover the Spanish Civil War for Collier’s magazine. She packed everything she had, and Ernest joined her on her journey to work as correspondents in Spain. She wrote all about bombings during the war, injured soldiers, and life on the frontlines.
Martha later moved on to cover invasions of Czechoslovakia and Finland in the late 1930s. She wrote a book titled “A Stricken Field,” published in 1968, about the atrocities she saw in Europe as the Gestapo entered Prague.
In 1940, Martha and Ernest married, making her his third wife. Not long after their Wyoming wedding, she was asked by Collier’s to report on conflicts in China. Though Ernest didn’t want to go, she convinced him to travel with her.
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