Hiroshima By: John Hersey In Tientsin, china on June 17th 1917 John Richard Heresy was born. His family moved back to the USA in 1925. He worked for time magazine as a journalist for World War II. In 1945 he wrote his first war novel A Bell for Adano, which won a Pulitzer Prize. The next year he wrote Hiroshima. This was the start of his stand against nuclear warfare and human suffering. After 1947 his focus in writing was mainly fiction. He has been a president of the Authors League of America and elected by the membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to be there chancellor. In 1993 he published his 26th book, which was his last. Hersey died in Key West, Florida on March 24, 1993.
Heresy's editor, William Shaw was the one with the idea of the book it started as a newspaper article.
United States
Hiroshima in ruins, October 1945, two months after...
John Hersey, Pulitzer Prize laureateShaw said the bomb, the affects, if it should be dropped, and how it was built has been discussed a lot. He then said the more time that went by the better discussing the affects on Hiroshima seemed liked a good Idea. Hersey went on to Japan to have interviews with people in Tokyo and Hiroshima. While in Japan he said, "I felt I would like to write about what happened not to buildings but to human beings." When he got back he decided to focus on these six people because of there great interviews and the closeness to ground zero they had. They started it as a 150-page manuscript and didn't want to split it up in to 4 sections so they edited it and took all editorial space in the New Yorker one week and put in the newspaper.
This book came across purely as a reporter's style...