Volume 51, Number 6 · April 8, 2004
Living Dangerously
By Al Alvarez
Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
by Caroline Moorehead
Henry Holt, 463 pp., $27.50
In 1934, when Martha Gellhorn was twenty-five years old, she joined a team of sixteen writers hired by Harry Hopkins of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to tour the country and report to him and the President about the state of the nation during the Great Depression. The pay was $35 a week, plus train vouchers and $5 a day for expenses, but it seemed lavish compared to the misery she saw. She went first to North Carolina, then to New England, then west, increasingly outraged by both the poverty, degradation, and patience of the unemployed and the greed and stupidity of the people who were supposed to be helping them. In Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, writes Caroline Moorehead,
Review, 3283 words
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