Description

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

Publisher Review

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 * Superbly crafted, engaging and engaged... Martha Gellhorn leaps off the page-marvellous * Literary Review * 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 *