This image is the cover for the book Stricken Field

Stricken Field

“Powerfully illustrates how Western societies fail in their duty to protect the most vulnerable among us: stateless and homeless refugees.” —Anne Boyd Rioux, LitHub

Martha Gellhorn was one of the first—and most widely read—female war correspondents of the twentieth century. She is best known for her fearless reporting in Europe before and during WWII and for her brief marriage to Ernest Hemingway, but she was also an acclaimed novelist.

In 1938, before the Munich pact, Gellhorn visited Prague and witnessed its transformation from a proud democracy preparing to battle Hitler to a country occupied by the German army. Born out of this experience, A Stricken Field follows a journalist who returns to Prague after its annexation and finds her efforts to obtain help for the refugees and to convey the shocking state of the country both frustrating and futile. A convincing account of a people under the brutal oppression of the Gestapo, A Stricken Field is Gellhorn’s most powerful work of fiction.

“[A] brave, final novel. Its writing is quick with movement and with sympathy; its people alive with death, if one can put it that way. It leaves one with aching heart and questing mind.” —New York Herald Tribune

“The translation of [Gellhorn’s] personal testimony into the form of a novel has . . . force and point.” —Times Literary Supplement

“ A Stricken Field is packed with as much tension, menace and dread as any contemporary thriller.” —Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

“A compelling book and a moving one.” ―The New York Times

Martha Gellhorn, Caroline Moorehead

Martha Gellhorn was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1908. She dropped out of Bryn Mawr to pursue a career in journalism. Gellhorn spent time living in Paris; documented the Great Depression for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration; traveled with her future husband, Ernest Hemingway, to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War; and journeyed to Western Europe to cover World War II. Her reporting career was distinguished and lengthy, as she also covered the Vietnam War and conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama. An author of both fiction and nonfiction, her works include the memoir Travels with Myself and Another and the novels Point of No Return, What Mad Pursuit, and The Trouble I’ve Seen. She died in 1998.

 

The University of Chicago Press