Martha Gellhorn: Fearless Journalist

Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998) spent her professional life covering major conflicts, including the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Fearless and prolific, she blazed a trail for future female journalists. Gellhorn was one of five individuals―and the only woman―honored on the 2008 American Journalists stamps.

I recently caught up with author Caroline Moorehead, who wrote Martha Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life, an extensive biography of the influential journalist. Via email, Moorehead answered a few of our questions about Gellhorn.

Why do you think Martha Gellhorn was such an influential journalist?

I think she was one of the very first war correspondents to look at war from the point of view of the civilians. That’s what interested her: what happens to ordinary people when war is all around you. Something of her muted and eloquent outrage, barely kept in check, was very powerful. Younger journalists read and copied.

When she started out, were female war correspondents rare?

Yes, pretty rare. No tradition for them to go anywhere near the front line for a start. [There was a] feeling that somehow [it was] not right or decorous to have them around. But there were a few in Spain, and by the end of World War II, numbers were growing.

And did she face discrimination from her fellow journalists and also the subjects she covered?

The military were constantly angry with her for venturing to places she should not have gone to; fellow journalists tended to find her daunting and very glamorous; she was very forthright and bold and energetic, and people seem to have admired her.

Gellhorn traveled to war zones well into old age. What do you think kept her going?

No adrenaline like it; also, the license to see, to ask questions, to witness, to convey what she saw, was irresistible. That was what she did. She wasn’t much interested in comfort or safety.

At the moment, are you working on anything?

I am writing a sequel to a book I had out in September called A Train in Winter, about a group of women from the French resistance. The new one is about a plateau in the Ardèche, where they set about saving people hunted by the Gestapo.

National Book Month: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was acclaimed for her novels, short stories, and works of non-fiction that vividly portrayed both the beauty of the Florida backwoods and the lives of the people who lived there. After publishing her first two novels—South Moon Under in 1933 and Golden Apples in 1935—Rawlings achieved major success with The Yearling.

Published in 1938, The Yearling tells the story of 12-year-old Jody Baxter, who lives with his parents in the Florida backwoods. When a rattlesnake bite prompts his father to shoot and kill a doe to save his own life, Jody adopts the doe’s fawn as a pet. The rambunctious fawn soon causes trouble at the farmstead, forcing the Baxters to make a difficult decision during uncertain times.

Published to rave reviews, The Yearling sold 240,000 copies during its first year in print and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. The New York Herald Tribune compared the book’s protagonist, Jody Baxter, to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and a Time magazine reviewer wrote that The Yearling stood “a good chance, when adults have finished with it, of finding a permanent place in adolescent libraries.”

In 2008 Rawlings was featured on the 24th stamp in the Literary Arts series. In the foreground of the stamp art is a portrait of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings based on an undated photograph. The background depicts a fawn at a watering hole in the Florida scrub country. The rows of spots on the fawn, which are consistent with descriptions in The Yearling, indicate that the fawn is a young male.