Gellhorn, Martha Ellis (1908–1998)

US journalist and writer. She reported on wars in Java (1946), Vietnam (1966), the Middle East (1967), and Central America (1983–85). Her novels include A Stricken Field (1940), Liano (1948), and The Wine of Astonishment (1948). She also published short stories. Her writing is marked by acute observation, and contains sympathy for the weak or oppressed and moral straightforwardness.

Born in St Louis, Missouri, and educated at Bryn Mawr College, she became a foreign correspondent for Collier's Weekly. Here she covered the Spanish Civil War alongside Ernest Hemingway, whom she later married in 1940. Gellhorn went on to report on World War II, when she was one of the first to witness the horrors of Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated. Her outrage at US military involvement in Vietnam during the 1960s led to a series of passionate reports so critical that in 1967 the US authorities refused her a visa to return there. She later covered the 1980s conflicts in Central America. Her earlier reportage was collected in The Face of War (1959).