John Hersey

John Hersey wrote Hiroshima, which told American readers what the bomb had done to people rather than to a city. He was born in Tientsin to missionary parents, spoke Chinese before English, and covered the Second World War for Time and Life in Europe and the Pacific, winning a Pulitzer for a novel about the occupation of Sicily. In 1946 he went to Japan for the New Yorker. What he produced was 31,000 words following six survivors - two doctors, a widowed seamstress, a German priest, a young clerk and a Methodist minister - through the morning of 6 August 1945 and the weeks after it, written flatly, with no editorialising and no adjectives doing work the facts could do themselves. The New Yorker gave the whole issue of 31 August 1946 to it, cancelling everything else, which it had never done. It sold out in hours, was read aloud on the radio over four nights, and the Book-of-the-Month Club sent free copies to its members. Occupation censorship kept it out of Japan until 1949. It did more than any other single piece of writing to make the human effects of nuclear weapons concrete to the public that had used them. He taught at Yale for twenty years and wrote fifteen more books. He gave much of the royalties to the Japanese Red Cross. The piece is regularly named the best work of American journalism of the twentieth century, and its method - long-form reporting through a few named people, with the writer absent - became a template. He was among the first to argue in print that the decision to use the bomb deserved public argument rather than deference.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history