Trouble I've Seen, The.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s Copy
of the Author’s First Book
[Roosevelt, Eleanor]. Gellhorn, Martha. The Trouble I’ve Seen. With a Preface by H.G. Wells. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1936.
8vo.; endpapers offset; top edge darkened; blue cloth; spine sunned. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition; second printing of Gellhorn’s first book. A presentation copy, inscribed to Eleanor Roosevelt: For Mrs. Roosevelt/with gratitude and devotion/Martha Gellhorn. Gellhorn and Roosevelt became lifelong friends through Gellhorn’s work on this book; it is a “report” in the form of four short stories that Gellhorn wrote for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. It was through that work that she met President and Mrs. Roosevelt.
The novellas included are titled, “Mrs. Maddison,” “Joe and Pete,” “Jim,” and Ruby.” In his Preface, Wells praises Gellhorn’s writing: “She is a new writer but her technique has an instinctive directness and vigour and all she tells is drawn from her own acutely apprehended experiences as a worker in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Enlarge this book a million times and you have the complete American tragedy. She has that sympathetic artistry which achieves identification between reader and character. …Mrs. Gellhorn seems to me a very considerable writer indeed.” Wells concludes by aligning Gellhorn’s writing with a social-minded, proletarian spirit; he describes the events and characters in these stories as similar to what can be found in “industrial regions” around the world, in Europe, the Soviet Union, and Asia.
This sensibility – along with her style that has been described as a “journalistic approach” to fiction – is evident at the outset of the story, “Mrs. Maddison Returns to the Land”; it begins:
In the relief office they had read the bulletins coming from Washington via State headquarters, and they had received a good many visitors called field supervisors and field representatives. Under pressure and feeling theirs-not-to-reason-why, they had shipped unemployed families back to the land. It was a Project, which made it vast and important, possible of endless interpretation and confusion, and above all it had to be done quickly. Some of the Relief workers, who had lived long in these parts and knew conditions and what had to have to farm, and what kind of land they were putting people on, and what the houses meant in ill-health, shook their heads grimly but in wise silence. Rural rehabilitation: in itself a magnificent idea. A chance for men to be again self-supporting; their own masters; captains of their destinies, souls, pocket-books.
Gellhorn (1908-1998) was educated at Bryn Mawr College; and, in 1940, married Ernest Hemingway; she was his third wife and enjoyed—if that is the word—the shortest-lived of his marriages. Indeed, Gellhorn was Hemingway’s only wife who left him before he left her. After the publication of The Trouble I’ve Seen, Gellhorn spent the next decade working as a war correspondent in Spain, Finland, China, England, Italy, France, Germany, and Java for Collier’s Weekly; twenty years later, she resumed these duties in Vietnam and Israel for the London Guardian. In addition to this book, Gellhorn published a dozen other novels and short story collections, including: Liana (1944); The Wine of Astonishment (1948); Pretty Tales for Tired People (1965) and The Weather in Africa (1980). She also published nonfiction: The Face of War (1959), a collection of her war reporting; Travels with Myself and Another (1978), about her life with Hemingway; and The View from the Ground (1986), a collection of peacetime reporting. She won the O. Henry Award for Two by Two (1958).
Though the overwhelming majority of books from Mrs. Roosevelt's library came into the market thanks to two family dispersals – the Hammer Gallery auction in 1946, following FDR's death, with the gallery’s estate plate affixed to most volumes, and a sale
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