An anthology spanning six decades of on-the-scene journalism from “one of the most eloquent witnesses of the twentieth century” (Bill Buford, Granta).
For nearly sixty years, Martha Gellhorn traveled the globe to report on the tumult and extremity of life in the twentieth century. The View from the Ground, as Gellhorn explains, “is a selection of articles written during six decades; peace-time reporting. That is to say, the countries in the background were at peace at the moment of writing; not that there was peace on earth.”
Included here are accounts of America during the Depression, Israel and Palestine in the 1950s, post-Franco Spain, protests at the White House, domestic life in Africa, and Gellhorn’s return to Cuba after a forty-one-year absence—among many other topics. Informed by the horrors of fascism in Spain and Germany, the modern terror in Central America, and by the courage of those who stand up to the thugs both in an out of government, The View from the Ground is a singular act of testimony that, like its companion volume, The Face of War, is “an eloquent, unforgettable history of a chaotic century” (San Francisco Chronicle).
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.