The Women Who Wrote the War

The Riveting Saga of World War II's Daredevil Women and Correspondents

A “vividly narrated” portrait of Margaret Bourke-White, Martha Gellhorn, and over ninety other female reporters who covered WWII combat (Robert Caro).

The annals of the greatest generation are not complete without acknowledging the contributions of America’s fearless female combat correspondents. In this long-overdue book, Nancy Sorel pays homage to these unsung heroes, many of whom left comfortable lives behind to chronicle events on the battlefields of Europe and Asia during the Second World War.

A few became world-famous, like photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, the only Western photographer to cover the Nazi invasion of the USSR; Martha Gellhorn, writer and wife of Ernest Hemingway, who presciently reported on the menace of fascism; the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner, recording the bleak realities of life in post-liberation France; and Marguerite Higgins, who dared to enter the concentration camp at Dachau just ahead of the American army. Many others have been overlooked by history. In this seamless narrative, Nancy Sorel weaves together the lives and times of one hundred gutsy, incomparable women, giving us, in the words of Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “an absorbing account of a generation of brave and resourceful women who proved that they were every bit as good as men in covering the greatest war in history.”