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novel, a quasi-autobiographical chick-lit bildungsroman about three college girls looking for sex and the meaning of life but instead finding disillusion and the clap. Originally she’d intended to call it Nothing Ever Happens , with a nod to a line from Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms —“nothing ever happens to the brave”; but by the time it was published she’d settled on What Mad Pursuit , swapping Hemingway for Keats. The novel wasn’t well reviewed, nor did it sell, and her father hated it. Martha was crushed, to her own surprise. “It has meant more to me than I would have believed, that my book is a failure,” she wrote to de Jouvenel. Determined to get it right—to “write great heavy swooping things [that] throw terror and glory into the mind”—she’d begun another project, a linked series of fictional portraits of the Depression’s victims, among them a labor organizer, a preteen child prostitute, and a grandmother on relief, called The Trouble I’ve Seen . It was this book for which Wells had procured her an English publisher, and its appearance, first in London and later in New York and Paris, was greeted with admiring press, including several mentions in Eleanor Roosevelt’s widely read syndicated column, “My Day.” Even her father approved; unfortunately, soon after reading the manuscript he died suddenly, of heart failure following surgery, in January 1936.
    Martha had been living in New York, trying to get a staff job at Time magazine, submitting ideas for pieces about Europe to The New Yorker , and carrying on an affair with a Time writer named Allen Grover, who like de Jouvenal was married and showed no inclination to leave his wife. When her father died, and neither Time nor The New Yorker offered her employment, she decided to cut her losses and run. During her romance with Bertrand she’d toyed with the outlines of a novel about the French and German pacifists they knew—the young internationalists in both countries who were determined not to repeat the holocaust of World War I, no matter the provocation; maybe now was a good time to return to Europe to make a start on it.
    In London she cadged an invitation to stay in Wells’s beautiful house in Regent’s Park, which she intended to use as a base in between her evenings out with the young men she seemed to collect on her travels. Fortunately, whatever his amorous fantasies about her, Wells was safely enmeshed in a long affair with Moura Budberg, Maxim Gorky’s former mistress, and during her visit seemed content to behave more like a mentor than a paramour. He told her he believed in her talent but felt it needed discipline, and he surprised her by insisting not only that she rise at eight to breakfast with him, but that she buckle down to work for several hours afterward, as he did.
    Martha was annoyed—that kind of regimen wasn’t for her , she sniffed, “not then or ever”—so she decided to get back at him by beating him at his own game. One morning, after the breakfast table had been cleared, she went out into the garden with her little portable typewriter and started tapping away. Before lunchtime she had dashed off a short, pungent piece called “Justice at Night,” an account of what happened when she and a companion (Bertrand de Jouvenel, although she called him “Joe” in the piece) were witnesses to the lynching of a seventeen-year-old black sharecropper outside of Columbia, Mississippi, not far from the Louisiana border. Like The Trouble I’ve Seen , “Justice at Night” displayed the sharp eye for precise detail and the clear, cool, seemingly neutral reportorial voice Gellhorn had developed in her short journalistic career, a voice that made the lurid narrative all the more shocking by contrast. Wells loved the piece and thought it should be published immediately, so Martha sent it to her London agent, who in turn sold it to The Spectator for fifty dollars; in the United States, Reader’s Digest