Martha Gellhorn

A Life

Caroline Moorehead

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Apple Books

'Engrossing - biography and memoir and the forms of today and Moorehead's book is vibrant proof of that' Rose Tremain, Books of the Year, Guardian

Discover the life of one of the twentieth century's most significant and notorious war correspondents, and the third wife of Ernest Hemingway.

Martha Gellhorn's journalism tracks many of the flashpoints of the twentieth century; as a young woman she witnessed the suffering of the American Depression and risked her life in the Spanish Civil War. Her dispatches from the front made her a legend, yet her private life was often messy and volcanic.

Her determination to be a war correspondent - and her conspicuous success - contributed to the breakdown of her infamously stormy marriage to Ernest Hemingway. In this mesmerising biography of a life that spanned the twentieth century, Moorehead reveals how passionately Martha fought against injustice, and how determined she was to catch the human story.

'A deeply sympathetic portrait... [it shows] an overwhelming sense of what it is to be human' Daily Telegraph

Published: 1 July 2010
ISBN: 9781409079484
Imprint: Vintage Digital
Format: EBook
Pages: 560

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About the author

Caroline Moorehead

Caroline Moorehead is the biographer of Bertrand Russell, Freya Stark, Iris Origo and Martha Gellhorn. Her book on the French Resistance, Village of Secrets, was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2014. Her most recent book, A Bold and Dangerous Family, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award. She lives in London.

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Praise for Martha Gellhorn

An enthralling biography - with an unflinching honesty Martha would have approved of
Daily Mail

As one would expect from a writer of Caroline Moorehead's diligence and acuity, this is an extremely thorough, colourful and pacy biography
Sunday Telegraph

Gellhorn is a superb subject for biography. Caroline Moorehead has seized the opportunity with an elan that her subject would have admired. The result is an adventure story which, true to the genre, has moments of both triumph and tragedy
Independent on Sunday

Not often does a biography make you against the odds fall headlong for its heroine...but Caroline Moorehead's exemplary and exciting account of the Hemingway wife who reported the war like it was sweeps you incisively into a broad-based history of the last century through the eyes of two women, author and subject, each as brilliant as the other but sharply differing in temperament
David Hughes, Spectator