The View From The Ground | Granta

  • Published: 02/04/2015
  • ISBN: 9781783782260
  • Granta Books
  • 480 pages

The View From The Ground

Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn’s peacetime dispatches bear witness to six decades of change: America in the Great Depression, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia, young Poles undaunted by their Communist government, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Spain in the days after Franco’s death, Cuba revisited after forty-one years. Here is history as it looked and felt to the people who lived through it. Intense, courageous and vividly readable, The View from the Ground is a remarkable act of testimony.

Read and learn from her humanitariansim, be fired by the power of her writing and her haunting sense of place

Independent

The Author

Martha Gellhorn (1908-98) was born in St Louis, Missouri. In 1930, she talked her way into a free passage to Europe and arrived in Paris with seventy-five dollars in her pocket and the conviction that she could earn a living as a foreign correspondent. She returned to the United States in 1934 and two years later published her acclaimed The Trouble I’ve Seen. It was at this time that she met Ernest Hemingway, whom she married. In 1937 she returned to Europe as a war correspondent, and for the first nine years she reported on the wars in Spain, Finland, China and Java and finally from Europe during the Second World War. After 1946 she continued to report on whatever engaged her interest and concern, from Vietnam to the Middle East and the wars in Central America. As well as her journalism, Martha Gellhorn was the author of novels, collections of stories, novellas, works of non-fiction and a play.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

The Face Of War

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Martha Gellhorn was one of the twentieth century’s greatest war correspondents. The Face of War is a selection of her reports, on the conflicts in Spain, Finland, China and World War II, with later reports on Vietnam, Israel and Central America.

Martha Gellhorn on Granta.com

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Ohne Mich: Why I Shall Never Return To Germany

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‘Nothing would have brought me back except that I worried about the European Community whose full flowering I will surely not live to see but I invest my faith in it.’

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

The Invasion of Panama

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‘He turned his frantic smile and his sorrowful eyes to me, making sure I understood. “Nothing like this ever happened in Panama. Never.”’

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

The Thirties

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Martha Gellhorn on Paris in the thirties, cadging bed and breakfast off H.G. Wells and living in the White House with the Roosevelts.