Writer, Warrior, Witness.
Bryn Mawr College dropout Martha Gellhorn quit the Albany, New York, Times Union in 1930 to move to Paris and write. After 10 months of banging out ad copy and freelancing for The New Republic and other magazines, Gellhorn returned to the United States to undergo an abortion. Back in France with her married lover, she got pregnant again in 1933 and had another abortion. Writing for Vogue and working on a novel, What Mad Pursuit, Gellhorn traveled Europe and agonized about her affair, ultimately returning to the United States. In autumn 1934, through a journalist friend, Gellhorn got a job working for presidential adviser Harry Hopkins at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, analyzing welfare programs. In her reports, Gellhorn embraced a lifelong determination to make “little squeaking observations about the wrongness of things.” In curating the new Firefly Books title, Yours, for probably always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War 1930-1949, biographer Janet Somerville presents selections from Gellhorn’s correspondence with eminent figures including Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, and her first husband, Ernest Hemingway.
MG to Harry Hopkins November 26, 1934, Massachusetts
It is impossible in traveling through the state and seeing our relief set-up, not to feel that here incompetence has become a menace; and that the unemployed are suffering for the inadequacy of the administration. It seems that our administrative posts are frequently assigned on recommendations of the Mayor and town Board of Aldermen. The administrator is a nice inefficient guy who is being rewarded for being somebody’s cousin…
“PEOPLE DON’T ENJOY NEARLY AS MUCH HEARING ABOUT THEIR OWN WOES… AS THEY ENJOY HEARING ABOUT STRANGERS’ MESSES…”
Now about the unemployed themselves: this picture is so grim that whatever words I use will seem hysterical and exaggerated….I find them all in the same shape—fear, fear driving them into a state of semi-collapse; cracking nerves; and an overpowering terror of the
