Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life (2005) by Caroline Moorehead This review first appeared in the New York Sun,

November 22, 2005 "The first major biography of Martha Gellhorn, Caroline Mooreheads publisher announ ces. So there is at least one minor biography? I hope readers will ask, for in f act there are two: Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave (1990) and Beautiful Exile (200 1) both authored by me, although I do not consider them minor. The first made Ge llhorn furious; the second provoked a press campaign to discredit me, conducted on her behalf by friends in Britain. This sequence of events perhaps explains wh y neither is included in Ms. Mooreheads sources and select bibliography. The Gellho rn estate has authorized her, and that means I have become the nonbiographer. Martha Gellhorn is rightly described in the publishers copy as having pursued a he roic career as a reporter [which] brought her to the front lines of virtually ev ery significant international conflict between the Spanish Civil War and the end of the Cold War. She was also Ernest Hemingways third wife, the only one to walk out on him, and a fine writer of novellas, which Alfred A. Knopf published in a single fat volume a decade ago. I learned a good deal about Gellhorn from reading Ms. Mooreheads book chiefly how she viewed her own life in letters that only her authorized biographer has been allowed to read. Gellhorn was more critical of herself than I had imagined, ack nowledging that she put all her skill into reporting. She had a great eye and ea r, but she had no gift for analysis. I knew that Gellhorn could only write about what she had seen and heard, and that she was no thinker, but I did not realize that she herself came to this same conclusion after fruitless efforts to comple te books about the Spanish Civil War, Cuba, and Vietnam. Readers of this column are already familiar with my method of inquiry: What is n ew in this biography? How does Ms. Moorehead handle her sources? How does her bo ok accord with my understanding of biography as a genre? First, Ms. Moorehead has had the unlimited access to the evidence and interviewe es that every biographer seeks. I was delighted to see descriptions of Gellhorns austere London flat, virtually a mirror of her astringent mind; to discover that she was very pleased with her long and narrow feet and had Ferragamo make shoes especially for her; that new words made her laugh with sudden delight. From Pluta rch to Boswell and beyond, good biographers have given us such details and anecd otes to make their subjects live again. There is one source, however, that Ms. Moorehead studiously avoids. In her only reference to my biographies, she repeats Gellhorns charge that my work is riddled with errors. Ms. Moorehead need not have trusted my books. By using almost any of the Internet search engines, she could have found my archive at the Universit y of Tulsa, open to any researcher who wants to examine the notes, correspondenc e, and tape-recorded interviews I used in my two biographies of Martha Gellhorn. I eagerly read Ms. Moorehead to see what I got wrong, but her biography only co nfirms what I believed: that Gellhorns charges had no merit. One of Gellhorns clos est friends, the biographer Victoria Glendinning, once told me that she doubted I had made errors and assured me that Gellhorn was just mad at me.