In theme with Memorial Day, USA Today highlighted a new HBO movie, Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen as Hemingway, and Nicole Kidman as Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s his third wife. Gellhorn had an amazing life.  As Nicole Kidman says, “Her main thrust as a woman was not as a mother or a wife. It was as… 

…a career woman, a journalist, and a war correspondent.”  Here are a few details of her life:

-She was an American novelist, travel writer and journalist, and one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century.

-She reported on “virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career.”

-She and Hemingway met in 1936, and later bonded in “Madrid, where both had traveled for the Spanish Civil War.”  They married in December, 1940, had a 4 year contentious marriage before divorcing in 1945.

-She was fiercely intelligent and independent, and when Hemingway wanted her to stay in Cuba while he writes, she had a “hunger to see and cover the world” — and did. When he tried to block her to travel to cover the D-Day Invasion, “she told him she had had enough.”

-As a journalist, she “had a gift for writing about how the turmoil of war affected ordinary people” and “wrote brilliantly about the effects of war and unhappiness and loneliness and poverty on people who had been attacked.”

-When she was about 40 years old, she adopted a boy from an Italian orphanage. Ok..she was not childfree her whole life, but when she decided she wanted a child, she chose to raise a child who was already here in need of a home.  She did not know it, but what she did was right up the alley of The Offspring Assumption I talk about in The Baby Matrix!

-At age 89, she committed suicide, after a battle with cancer and near total blindness.

According to the movie’s director, Philip Kaufman, Gellhorn was “sort of lost by history,” and he hopes the movie will bring people back to reading Gellhorn and recognizing her bravery… and brilliance.

She is a woman I wish I could have known, as well as a life long friend of hers…of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Read any of Gellhorn’s work? It’s on my reading list for sure.

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