This summer has seen the publication of The Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, a book that offers fresh insight into the personal thoughts and professional aspirations of one of the world's first female war correspondents. Gellhorn was a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly for more than three decades. In light of the renewed interest in Gellhorn sparked by publication of this book, we're making available a few of her major contributions to The Atlantic, along with a brief look back at her frutiful life.

Gellhorn began her career as a journalist during the Spanish Civil War, arriving in Madrid in 1937 with nothing but a knapsack, fifty dollars, and an assignment to cover the conflict for Collier's Weekly. During this period she met Ernest Hemingway, also in Spain as a correspondent; they married in 1940, he becoming her second husband and she his third wife. The marriage lasted five years, ending when Gellhorn left Hemingway, the only of his wives to do so.

A gutsy reporter, Gellhorn would go to great lengths to get a story—stowing away on a hospital ship and sneaking ashore as a stretcher bearer during the D-Day landings at Normandy, riding along with British pilots on night bombing raids over Germany, accompanying Allied troops when they liberated Dachau. And her energy reserves seemed inexhaustible: incredibly, in 1989, at the age of eighty-one, she was still out at the front reporting—on the United States invasion of Panama. It was only when war came to Bosnia that she had to pass on taking an assignment, saying that she was too old and not "nimble" enough for war anymore.