The Trouble I've Seen

By Martha Gellhorn

These four interlinked stories encapsulate Martha Gellhorn's firsthand observation of the Great Depression. Fiction crafted with documentary accuracy, they vividly render the gradual spiritual collapse of the simple, homely sufficiency of American life in the face of sudden unemployment, desperate poverty and hopelessness. They catch the mood of a generation 'sucked into indifference' and of young men who no longer 'believe in man or God, let alone private industry'. Martha was the youngest of a squad of sixteen, handpicked reporters who were paid to file accurate, confidential reports on the human stories behind the statisti of the Depression directly to Roosevelt's White House. In these pages, we understand the real cost of sudden destitution on a vast scale. We taste the dust in the mouth, smell the disease and feel the hopelessness and the despair. And here, too, we can hear the earliest cadences of the voice of a writer who went on to become, arguably, the greatest female war reporter of the 20th century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eland Publishing
• Release date: May 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781906011871

Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1908. She dropped out of Bryn Mawr to pursue a career in journalism. Gellhorn spent time living in Paris; documented the Great Depression for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration; traveled with her future husband, Ernest Hemingway, to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War; and journeyed to Western Europe to cover World War II. Her reporting career was distinguished and lengthy, as she also covered the Vietnam War and conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama. An author of both fiction and nonfiction, her works include the memoir Travels with Myself and Another and the novels Point of No Return, What Mad Pursuit, and The Trouble I’ve Seen. She died in 1998.  

Reviews for The Trouble I've Seen

[Annina · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great view of working class below poverty line, would've wanted to hear more, especially about Ruby's lifestory. Seemed very realistic.