The Face of War - Paperback

by Martha Gellhorn (Author)

A collection of "first-rate frontline journalism" from the Spanish Civil War to US actions in Central America "by a woman singularly unafraid of guns" (Vanity Fair).

For nearly sixty years, Martha Gellhorn's fearless war correspondence made her a leading journalistic voice of her generation. From the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the Central American wars of the mid-eighties, Gellhorn's candid reporting reflected her deep empathy for people regardless of their political ideology. Collecting the best of Gellhorn's writing on foreign conflicts, and now with a new introduction by Lauren Elkin, The Face of War is a classic of frontline journalism by "the premier war correspondent of the twentieth century" (Ward Just, The New York Times Magazine).

Whether in Java, Finland, the Middle East, or Vietnam, she used the same vigorous approach. "I wrote very fast, as I had to," she says, "afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place." As Merle Rubin noted in his review of this volume for

The Christian Science Monitor, "Martha Gellhorn's courageous, independent-minded reportage breaks through geopolitical abstractions and ideological propaganda to take the reader straight to the scene of the event."

Author Biography

Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She was a war correspondent for Collier's Weekly of New York from 1937 to 1946 and for the Guardian of London from 1966-1967. In addition to her journalism, she wrote seven novels and four short-story collections, receiving an O. Henry Award in 1958. She was married to Ernest Hemingway from 1940 to 1946 and T. S. Matthews from 1954 to 1963. Gellhorn lived most of her life in London.