LONDON -- Martha Gellhorn, 89, who gained fame as one of the world's first female war reporters and as a wife of writer Ernest Hemingway, died at her home here Feb. 15. She had cancer.
Miss Gellhorn had covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam War and the 1967 Arab-Israeli wars. Her last work as a war correspondent was in El Salvador during the 1980s. A cataract operation left her with damaged eyesight and prevented her from using the manual typewriter she had always worked with.
When the Bosnian war broke out in the 1990s, she announced that she was too old to go. "You need to be nimble," she said.
Her World War II coverage included the D-Day landings and the heart-wrenching liberation of the Nazis' Dachau concentration camp. She brought a fresh approach to war journalism, writing passionately about the dreadful impact of war on the innocent, becoming a role model for journalists of both sexes.
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Miss Gellhorn, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, launched a reporting career that spanned several decades and a variety of publications, including Collier's Weekly -- for which she covered the 1937-38 Spanish Civil War -- and Atlantic Monthly, which dispatched her to report the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
The Guardian of London sent her to cover the conflict in Vietnam in 1966 and in Israel the next year.
Miss Gellhorn's first major assignment was covering the Spanish Civil War. She had met Hemingway a year earlier at Sloppy Joe's bar in Florida's Key West. The two became lovers in Spain and married in 1940, but theirs was a bitter union.
She ended their relationship five years later while they were staying at London's Dorchester Hotel. She said he had driven her mad with jealousy and his "ceaseless, crazy bullying."
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Like their marriage, their separation was acrimonious. Miss Gellhorn described Hemingway as "one of the greatest self-created myths in history."
Miss Gellhorn, who wrote 13 novels of her own, including "The Honeyed Peace" and "The Trouble I've Seen," resented being most famous as the third wife of Hemingway. "I was a writer before I met him, and I have been a writer for 45 years since," she once complained. "Why should I be a footnote to someone else's life?"
Miss Gellhorn was born in St Louis. Her father was a prominent physician, and her mother campaigned for women's votes and social reform.
Miss Gellhorn married three times. Her first husband was French writer Bertrand de Jouvenel, from whom she was divorced by the time she met Hemingway. Her third husband was Time magazine editor T.S. Mathews, whom she left because she was "utterly bored."
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"For me, marriage is a terrible institution, and it should be suppressed," Gellhorn once said.
She had one son, George Alexander Gellhorn, whom she brought up alone, writing what she called "bilge stories" for women's magazines to make money.
Over the years, Miss Gellhorn lived in France, Cuba, Mexico, Italy and Kenya. She divided her final years between an apartment in central London and a cottage in Wales.
She once lived in the White House as a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt's, and while still in her twenties appeared on the cover of the respected Saturday Review of Books.
She left the United States after World War II, saying she could not live in a "colonial power."
She once explained the secret of her long life with the thought, "I drink and I smoke and I eat very stupidly. . . . It bores me, all this health stuff."
She summed up her life by concluding that "I'm over-privileged. I've had a wonderful life. I didn't deserve it, but I've had it."
In addition to her son, survivors include an adopted son, Sandy Gellhorn, and a brother, Alfred.
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