Hersey, the author of more than a dozen novels as well as many sketches, commentaries, articles, and essays, has a well-earned reputation as one of America's most important novelists of the post-World War II period, but it is his work as a journalist that comprises his most significant legacy to American literature of the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, his nonfiction account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, which awakened America to the human consequences of nuclear warfare, is significant both as a literary accomplishment and as a cultural event. Hiroshima, first published in August 1946 and reissued in 1985 with an update on the fates of its characters, is often cited as a seminal example of the nonfiction novel in America, a predecessor of the genre later developed and refined by Truman Capote , Tom Wolfe , and other so-called New Journalists. Hersey's account of the lives of six survivors of the world's first atomic bombing of a major city helped America take its first halting steps toward coming to terms with the significance of what it had done to end World War II.
John Richard Hersey was born 17 June 1914 in Tientsin, China, the youngest son of Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey, who had come to China in 1905 as YMCA missionaries during the great "Social Gospel" wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hersey attended British and American schools in China until 1925 when his father became ill with encephalitis during a trip on a mule cart through a famine-stricken region of China, forcing the family to return to the United States to seek medical treatment. Hersey's father eventually died from the illness, and Hersey later struggled to come to terms with the significance of the family's sacrifice to a cause that he had come to view in morally ambiguous terms.
Hersey entered Yale in 1932 and worked as a writer on the Yale Daily News. He played football under the direction of a recent Yale graduate and rookie coach, Gerald Ford, whom Hersey met again nearly forty years later in the Oval Office while gathering material for a book on the presidency. Following his graduation in 1936 Hersey studied English literature at Cambridge University for a year, returning to work as Sinclair Lewis 's secretary during the summer of 1937. Claiming never to know of Lewis's serious problems with alcohol, Hersey found the older writer charming, entertaining, and eccentric, although the manuscripts that Lewis gave Hersey to edit revealed that Lewis's talent was waning.
Hersey joined the staff of Time in the fall of 1937, the magazine he later described as "the liveliest enterprise of its type," according to David Sanders in John Hersey (1967). Hersey and Henry R. Luce , publisher of Time, formed an instant bond based in part on the fact that though nearly a generation apart in age, both...