Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn’s quartet of novellas, The Trouble I’ve Seen, was published in 1936. The Face of War, a collection of her journalism, is available from Granta.

Memory

Martha Gellhorn, 12 December 1996

This is how my memory works.

Mean Streets of Salvador

Martha Gellhorn, 22 August 1996

The crime reporter said: ‘They don’t kill as many children here in Salvador as they do in Rio and São Paolo.’ Salvador has a population of two and a quarter million, Rio de Janeiro ten million, São Paolo 17 million. He was a nice man, middle-aged, overweight, with a beat-up face and friendly eyes. We sat around his metal desk in the big bare city office of his newspaper, among other empty metal desks. As the top specialist on the leading local paper, he should have had all the facts and figures, but he knew no more than anyone could know. The murder of a homeless child or a child from a poor family who was on the streets for much of the time was not news: children had been killed at random on the streets of Brazil’s cities since 1985.

Her Guns

Jeremy Harding, 8 March 1990

As a young girl growing up in St Louis, Missouri, Martha Gellhorn had a habit of poring over maps; riding on the city’s tramcars, she would imagine she was bound for distant places with...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences