AFTER ALL THE WORLD

A Novel of Martha Gellhorn

this winged heart covered in Milagros (healing charms) comes from Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Martha Gellhorn lived from 1948-1952.

Young Martha Gellhorn set out from St. Louis in the 1920s ready to fix the world. Independent, headstrong, and increasingly glamorous, she arrived in Paris with $75 to her name, and became a journalist. Horrified by the rise of fascism, she first saw war in Spain, and married Ernest Hemingway, but left him to cover the Italian and Western fronts of World War II, defying also a military ban on women correspondents. Taking history personally, and volubly defending democracy, she witnessed atrocities from Madrid in 1937 to Brazil in 1996, including Dachau in the days after it was liberated.

Scarred and enraged by all she saw, Gellhorn never stopped fighting for brutalized, displaced, and hungry people. Her war correspondence is among the best ever written: gorgeously crafted, groundbreaking in its focus on civilians, seething against injustice. She adopted an Italian war orphan, but often left him to cover the next conflict. An early and vehement critic of the nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War, she became known for caustic anger. Restless, relentless, blunt, and hilarious, she alternately drank and raged and retreated into deep solitude, found solace in the beauty of the natural world and in dear friends including Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Capa, and Leonard Bernstein, and bore witness to the length and breadth of the twentieth century.

AFTER ALL THE WORLD is the first work to explore Gellhorn’s rage through the trauma of her wartime experiences. She was never conscripted or imprisoned, and lived an elegant and fascinating life. But she also contended with disruptive and fractured memories, drug and alcohol abuse, eruptions of anger, and retreats into solitude, as do many soldiers and survivors. Movement was her main relief: she traveled constantly, making homes in nine countries on three continents.

Written as a novel, AFTER ALL THE WORLD draws deeply from Gellhorn’s enormous legacy in notes, dispatches, letters, and fiction, both published and unpublished. Quick, immersive stories from her life show the ambition that drove her toward Dachau, and the anguish and despair she took away from it. The stories erupt full-blown and leap one to the next like the fractured memories of trauma survivors. The book captures Gellhorn’s courage, wit, compassion, and disdain for the tragic folly of governments. Her drive to witness, and then her struggle to live with memories of great tragedies of human history, are an inspiration and a guide for all of us.

To read a sample chapter, click HERE.

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