John Hersey

For more information on John Richard Hersey, visit Britannica.com.

Hersey, John Richard (hûr'sē) , 1914–93, American author, b. China, grad. Yale, 1936. Reflecting his experiences as a war correspondent in World War II, many of his writings are concerned with the problem of intolerance and inhumanity. His first novel, A Bell for Adano (1944; Pulitzer Prize), depicts the American occupation of a rural town in war-torn Italy. Later novels include The Wall (1950), about the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto against the Nazis; The War Lover (1959); The Child Buyer (1960); Letter to the Alumni (1970); The Conspiracy (1972); and Antonietta (1991). His nonfiction works include Hiroshima (1946), a powerful report of the effects of atomic bombing; The Algiers Motel Incident (1968), concerning an occurrence in the 1967 Detroit race riot; and Blues (1987), about fishing. Collections of his short stories include Fling and Other Stories (1990) and his last, Key West Tales (1994).

Bibliography

See studies by D. Sanders (1967) and N. L. Huse (1983).

(1914-1993)

1942	Men on Bataan. Although the fate of U.S. soldiers is still not fully known, Hersey reconstructs the story of the fall of the Philippines from available news dispatches and interviews with friends of General Douglas MacArthur and soldiers' families. Hersey was born in China, served as a secretary to Sinclair Lewis, and worked as a magazine writer and war correspondent.
1943	Into the Valley: A Skirmish of the Marines. Hersey describes jungle combat on Guadalcanal from the perspective of a Marine company. New York Times reviewer S. T. Williamson declares, "It might be held up alongside Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage without too much inflation."
1944	A Bell for Adano. Hersey's first novel presents the moral ambiguity of war, viewed through the American military occupation of a Sicilian village. A U.S. major helps replace the village's ancient bell, winning the respect of the inhabitants but the wrath of the commanding general. The novel would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 and be dramatized by Paul Osborn.
1946	Hiroshima. The entire August 31 issue of The New Yorker is devoted to Hersey's reporting on the effects of the atomic bombing on half a dozen people. Published in book form, this report is the author's most enduring work, instantly recognized as one of the classics of the war.
1950	The Wall. Hersey's ambitious novel chronicles the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis as reflected in the fictional diary of a Jewish scholar.
1953	The Marmot Drive. The first of Hersey's series of novels treating the inadequacies of modern life is an allegory about the conflict among residents of a small New England town, which echoes Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. It would be followed by A Single Pebble (1956), about a young American engineer whose experiences in China force him to reconsider his Western assumptions.
1959	The War Lover. Having previously published two smaller studies of the confrontation between the individual and the challenges of modern life in The Marmot Drive (1953) and The Single Pebble (1956), Hersey publishes one of his most ambitious works, an exploration of the persistent human attraction to war from the perspective of a bomber crew during World War II.
1960	The Child Buyer. Hersey's satiric novel imagines a society in which gifted children are purchased and "engineered" to become thinking machines.
1966	Too Far to Walk. Hersey looks at the contemporary campus scene, depicting undergraduates who pursue intense sensory experience by using LSD.
1968	The Algiers Motel Incident. Hersey reports on the killing of three African Americans in a gunfight with the police during the 1967 Detroit riots. In the author's view, the incident is symptomatic of America's racial divide.
1972	The Conspiracy. Hersey's epistolary historical novel dramatizes the plot in a.d. 64 to kill Emperor Nero, drawing correspondences between political corruption and civil liberty in ancient Rome and the contemporary scene.
1985	The Call. Hersey's novel treats the career of an American missionary in China through the first half of the twentieth century. It is considered one of the novelist's strongest works--in the words of reviewer Jonathan D. Spence, "the capstone to a writing career of enviable range and originality."

Quotes:

"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."