Martha Gellhorn – 2009
Martha Gellhorn, born and raised in St. Louis, quit college to get into the newspaper and magazine business. Her work evolved into literary journalism, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch carried some of her free-lance articles. Her wanderlust was legendary, and she traveled the world, often writing about her firsthand observations of wars, once stowing away on a hospital ship to get to the front lines in Europe. Hunkered down with the 82nd Airborne for several months, Gellhorn sent back eyewitness accounts of the Battle of the Bulge. She was in Vietnam in 1966 and at age 80, covered the U.S. invasion of Panama. Martha Gellhorn wore her emotions on her sleeve, and her writing endeared her to a generation of magazine and newspaper readers in Europe and the U.S.