CNN - Martha Gellhorn dies

Martha Gellhorn, the American writer and war correspondent who reported conflicts from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and Panama, died Monday

(CNN) -- Martha Gellhorn never walked in anyone's shadow even when she ducked into trenches to talk to soldiers. She was certainly never content to linger in the long shadow cast by her ex-husband, Ernest Hemingway. "I was a writer before I met him, and I have been a writer for 45 years since. Why should I be a footnote to someone else's life," she once said.

Gellhorn died of cancer Monday in London. She was 89.

As a novelist and war correspondent Gellhorn traveled the world in pursuit of conflict, covering, among others, the Spanish Civil War, Vietnam, the Sino-Japanese war, the U.S. invasion of Panama. She even stowed away on a hospital ship to cover the D-Day landings during World War II.

Gellhorn wasn't interested in talking to the bureaucrats. "All politicians are bores and liars and fakes. I talk to people," she said.

She illustrated, in eloquent words, how war affected ordinary people. She had "this very unsentimental untrenchened short-sentenced, observer-on-the-street, on-the-ground way of writing. She never would go to the general or top brass," Gellhorn Biographer Victoria Glendinning said.

"The thing about war is that it has two sides," Gellhorn said. "The first is the absolute horror of it. The other thing about it is you meet absolutely marvelous people ... brave and extraordinary people."

"Her travel writing was characterized by a high moral purpose and an overwhelming sense of justice," Bill Buford, literary editor of The New Yorker, told The Guardian. "What distinguishes her journalism is her eloquent outrage and commitment to fair play."

"She was amazing," he said. "She was nearly 90, smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish, and well into her 80s, with her high cheekbones, she could flirt as easily as women 50 years younger."

A gifted writer, Gellhorn wrote 13 novels, including "The Trouble I've Seen," which chronicled her experiences while traveling the United States for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration during the Great Depression.

It was the year following that book, in 1937, that she met Hemingway in Key West, Florida. He was married and had just published "To Have and Have Not." They became lovers in Spain in 1937 where he was covering the Spanish Civil War. Gellhorn would become a correspondent for that war as well, filing her first report for Colliers.

Hemingway dedicated "For Whom the Bell Tolls" -- his story of the Spanish Civil War -- to Gellhorn.

'I wanted to be where everybody was'

They married in 1940, right after he divorced his second wife Pauline. But as war had brought the two writers together, it also broke them apart. Their relationship deteriorated while she was in Europe covering World War II. They divorced in 1946.

Despite her many accomplishments, Gellhorn will forever be tethered to Hemingway and somewhat overshadowed by him. She clearly resented it.

But to this day she is seen as an appendage to Hemingway -- a search for her name on the World Wide Web nearly always turned up Hemingway details. She is mentioned as an afterthought.

Gellhorn spent her post-married life continuing to travel the world, a witness to the horrors of the Second World War. She was in London as German bombs rained down and in Dauchau when the concentration camps were liberated by the Allies.

She covered the Nuremberg Trials, and The Atlantic Monthly dispatched her to report the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

"I wanted to be where everybody was," she once said. "I didn't want to be someplace safe. Also, I have a marked tendency not to believe anything 'til I've seen it myself."

In a tribute in The Guardian, writer Julia Pascal described a meeting with Gellhorn, who explained to her the advantages of advancing age.

"Why do people talk of the horrors of old age? It's great. I feel like a fine old car with the parts gradually wearing out, but I'm not complaining," Gellhorn reportedly said. "Those who find growing old terrible are people who haven't done what they wanted with their lives."

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