Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn

by Carl Rollyson

ISBN 1 87663107 4

$19.95

Published November 2001

The first biography of the redoubtable woman war reporter.

Martha Gellhorn died in February 1998, just short of her ninetienth birthday, at the flat in London which had become the nearest thing this compulsive traveller ever had to a home town.

She made her name as a reporter of wars, from Spain in the 1930s to Panama in the 1980s, but she was also a novelist, a travel writer of great distinction and a passionate campaigner against fascism and against what she saw as the oppressive power of her native country, the United States.

A handsome woman, who never lost her allure, Gellhorn charmed men all her life. She married (and divorced) three of them, including Ernest Hemingway, and enjoyed affairs with many others, including an ageing H. G. Wells. Although she would have hated to be called a feminist, she remained, as this candid biography makes clear, very much her own woman.