MARTHA GELLHORN (1941-46) Photo archive

Np: 1941-1946. Set of three vintage original black-and-white photos, all just about fine:

• Two 7 x 5″ (18 x 13 cm) photos, both issued as publicity for her Gellhorn’s book, The Heart of America. Both have printed text on verso, one with an Oct 1941 date stamp, the other with a Dec 1941 stamp.

• One 10 x 8″ (25 x 20 cm) photo of Gellhorn as she arrives on a Pan Am flight from London. Interesting to note that this photo was actually distributed by Pan Am (clearly, they considered her an important enough passenger to publicize her presence on their flight). Mimeographed text on verso, Pan American stamp from LaGuardia Airport, and date stamps for May 19th and May 1946.

Martha Gellhorn was an American novelist, travel writer and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career.

Gellhorn met Ernest Hemingway during a 1936 Christmas family trip to Key West, Florida. Gellhorn had been hired to report for Collier’s Weekly on the Spanish Civil War, and the pair decided to travel to Spain together. The seven dispatches she sent from the Spanish battlefront from July 17, 1937 to November 1938 mostly dealt with the condition and anguish suffered by the civilians. Gellhorn and Hemingway celebrated Christmas of 1937 in Barcelona. In Germany, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler; in the spring of 1938, months before the Munich Agreement, she was in Czechoslovakia. After the outbreak of World War II, she described these events in the novel A Stricken Field (1940). She later reported the war from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore, and England.

Gellhorn and Hemingway lived together off and on for four years, before marrying in November 1940 (Hemingway had ostensibly lived with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, until 1939). Increasingly resentful of Gellhorn’s long absences during her reporting assignments, Hemingway wrote to her when she left their Finca Vigía estate near Havana in 1943 to cover the Italian Front: “Are you a war correspondent, or wife in my bed?” Hemingway, however, would later go to the front just before the Normandy landings, and Gellhorn also went, with Hemingway trying to block her travel. When she arrived, by means of a dangerous ocean voyage, in war-torn London (he had landed there eleven days before her, via an RAF flight on which she had arranged a seat for him), she told him she had had enough. She had found, as had his other wives, that, as described by Bernice Kert in The Hemingway Women: “Hemingway could never sustain a long-lived, wholly satisfying relationship with any one of his four wives. Married domesticity may have seemed to him the desirable culmination of romantic love, but sooner or later he became bored and restless, critical and bullying.” After four contentious years of marriage, they divorced in 1945.

Gellhorn is well remembered as a fearless journalist and was honored with a commemorative stamp by the U.S. Postal Service; she was the only woman of the five journalists who were honored. (Wikipedia)