John Richard Hersey (1914–93) was an American novelist and journalist. He is considered one of the earliest practitioners of “New Journalism,” a form of non-fiction reportage that borrows the storytelling techniques of fiction. He is mainly known for his Hiroshima (1946,) a gripping book that reveals the full horror of nuclear weapons.
Born in Tientsin, China, to U.S. missionary parents, Hersey was educated at Yale. He served as a foreign correspondent in East Asia, Italy, and the Soviet Union for Time and Life magazines 1937–46. He began to write both fiction and non-fiction using the information he gathered as a journalist, producing Men on Bataan (1942) and Into the Valley (1943.)
Hersey’s first big success was the novel A Bell for Adano (1945,) about an Italian-American officer in command of a Sicilian town liberated by the Allies in World War II. The book won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1945, and it was made into a play and a movie.
Hersey was one of the first Western reporters to arrive in Hiroshima after the 1945 atomic bombing. To document the aftermath, he wrote about how individual persons were affected, focusing on the lives of six people in Hiroshima at the explosion. Hersey’s stories were included in a single issue of The New Yorker in 1946. The stories were later serialized in newspapers across the U.S. and then published as the book Hiroshima (1946.) Critics opined it was the best writing to come out of the war. Albert Einstein supposedly purchased a thousand copies to hand out to friends and colleagues.
Hersey’s later works included The Wall (1950,) The War Lover (1959,) Under the Eye of the Storm (1967,) The Walnut Door (1977,) The Call (1985,) and Antonietta (1991.)
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The reality is that changes are coming… They must come. You must share in bringing them.
—John Hersey
Topics: Change
The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?
—John Hersey
Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
—John Hersey
Topics: Journalism
Mankind must destroy anti-humanity before it becomes extinct itself.
—John Hersey
What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.
—John Hersey
Topics: War
A writer is bound to have varying degrees of success, and I think that that is partly an issue of how central the burden of the story is to the author’s psyche.
—John Hersey
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