The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn - Softcover

Gellhorn, Martha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679743693 ISBN 13: 9780679743699

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1994

Synopsis

“[Blending] cool lyricism and fiery emotion, alternately prickly and welcoming, funny and stern, Gellhorn is one of the most extraordinary women of our era.”—Chicago Sun-Times
 
Spanning more than 40 years and settings that range from Depression-era America to the smartest London dinner parties to the highlands of East Africa, the novellas of Martha Gellhorn display the same qualities that have made her one of the most famous journalists of the twentieth century: an indelible sense of place, prose of breathtaking swiftness and precision, and an unerring fix on the hidden motives of her characters. Above all, Martha Gellhorn explores the ways men and women live privately—and often passionately—amid the rush of history.
 
“Reading Martha Gellhorn for the first time is a staggering experience. She is not a travel writer or a journalist or a novelist: she is all of these, and one of the most eloquent witnesses of the twentieth century.”—Bill Buford, Granta
 
“Martha Gellhorn is one of our very best writers. To the swift and vibrant medium of the [novella], she brings a richness of experience, a tenderness and depth of feeling.”—The Atlantic
 
“Peerless and hilarious . . . Martha Gellhorn is a wittily astringent writer.”—Vogue 

About this title

About the Author

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.

From Library Journal

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0679743693
• ISBN 13: 9780679743699
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 636