The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn - Hardcover

Martha Gellhorn published five novels and seven prize-winning collections of her explosive journalism. Her career spanned several decades: She covered the 1937–38 war in Spain, sent dispatches from the front in World War II and followed the trail of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and reported on the conflicts in Vietnam in 1966 and in Israel in 1967. Gellhorn died in 1998 at the age of 89.

Gellhorn's place in literary history has always been as the third Mrs. Ernest Hemingway, but she was a respected journalist and novelist in her own right. Now, with the renewed interest in her life and career (e.g., Bernice Kert's The Hemingway Women , LJ 5/15/83; Carl Rollyson's Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave , LJ 11/15/90), this volume gathers 14 novellas from four previously published collections, each representing a different stage in Gellhorn's life. Such tales as "Mrs. Maddison" from The Trouble I've Seen (1936) are fictionalized versions of her Depression-era reports. Ironic stories of sex, love, and marriage from Two by Two (1958) and Pretty Tales for Tired People ( LJ 6/1/65) are perhaps metaphors for Gellhorn's own marital woes. And the accounts of British colonials in a newly independent Africa ( The Weather in Africa , LJ 3/1/80) reflect her travels. Unfortunately, this book shows that Gellhorn's strengths as a writer lie in journalism, not fiction. Some of her plots seem contrived, and her English characters are often drawing-room cliches. While recommending this book for larger literature collections, this reviewer wonders whether it would have been published if Gellhorn had not been married to Hemingway.
- Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.