32 Facts About Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn was the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945.

Martha Gellhorn died in 1998 by apparent suicide at the age of 89, ill and almost completely blind.

Martha Gellhorn's brother Walter became a noted law professor at Columbia University, and her younger brother Alfred was an oncologist and dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

At age 7, Martha Gellhorn participated in "The Golden Lane," a rally for women's suffrage at the Democratic Party's 1916 national convention in St Louis.

In 1926, Martha Gellhorn graduated from John Burroughs School in St Louis, and enrolled in Bryn Mawr College, several miles outside Philadelphia.

Martha Gellhorn's first published articles appeared in The New Republic.

Martha Gellhorn spent years traveling Europe, writing for newspapers in Paris and St Louis and covering fashion for Vogue.

Martha Gellhorn became active in the pacifist movement, and wrote about her experiences in her 1934 book What Mad Pursuit.

Martha Gellhorn was hired as a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, created by Franklin D Roosevelt to help end the Great Depression.

Martha Gellhorn traveled around the United States for FERA to report on how the Depression was affecting the country.

Martha Gellhorn drew on her research to write a collection of short stories, The Trouble I've Seen.

In Idaho doing FERA work, Martha Gellhorn convinced a group of workers to break the windows of the FERA office to draw attention to their crooked boss.

Martha Gellhorn met Ernest Hemingway during a 1936 Christmas family trip to Key West, Florida.

Martha Gellhorn had been hired to report for Collier's Weekly on the Spanish Civil War, and the pair decided to travel to Spain together.

Martha Gellhorn later reported the war from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore, and England.

In June 1944, Martha Gellhorn applied to the British government for press accreditation to report on the Normandy landings; her application, like those of all female journalists, was denied.

Martha Gellhorn was among the first journalists to report from Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated by US troops on 29 April 1945.

Martha Gellhorn passed her 70th birthday in 1979 but continued working in the following decade, covering the civil wars in Central America.

Martha Gellhorn finally retired from journalism as the 1990s began.

Martha Gellhorn announced that she was "too old" to cover the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s.

Martha Gellhorn did manage one last overseas trip to Brazil in 1995 to report on poverty in that country, which was published in the literary journal Granta.

Martha Gellhorn's books include a collection of articles on war, The Face of War ; The Lowest Trees Have Tops, a novel about McCarthyism; an account of her travels, Travels with Myself and Another ; and a collection of her peacetime journalism, The View from the Ground.

Peripatetic by nature, Martha Gellhorn reckoned that in a 40-year span of her life, she had created homes in 19 locales.

Martha Gellhorn would have married de Jouvenel if his wife had consented to a divorce.

Martha Gellhorn met Ernest Hemingway in Key West, Florida, in 1936.

Between marriages after divorcing Hemingway in 1945, Martha Gellhorn had romantic liaisons with "L," Laurance Rockefeller, an American businessman ; journalist William Walton ; and medical doctor David Gurewitsch.

Martha Gellhorn stayed in London for some time before moving to Kenya and then to Kilgwrrwg near Devauden in Gwent, South Wales, Martha Gellhorn was very taken by the niceness of the Welsh people and lived there from 1980 to 1994 before finally returning to London because of her ill-health.

In 1949, Martha Gellhorn adopted a boy, Sandro, from an Italian orphanage.

Martha Gellhorn was formally renamed George Alexander Gellhorn, and widely called Sandy.

Martha Gellhorn was reportedly a devoted mother for a time but was not by nature maternal.

Martha Gellhorn left Sandy in the care of relatives in Englewood, New Jersey, for long periods as she travelled, and he eventually attended boarding school.

In 2011, Martha Gellhorn was the subject of an hour-long episode of the World Media Rights series Extraordinary Women, which airs on the BBC, and periodically in the United States on PBS.