Hiroshima

Essay by ayahelsalehJunior High, 9th grade December 2014

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Hiroshima

John Hersey was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and journalist. Hersey was born in Tientsin, China. He actually learned how to speak Chinese before English, which is pretty impressive. He came to the United States at the age of ten and attended public schools from then. He eventually graduated from Yale University. His passion was writing and reading, obviously. Hersey was in Japan after World War II, in the year of 1945 through 1946. He was one of the first journalists to be in Hiroshima after the tragic bombing that happened and took many lives. He was reporting and gathering all kinds of information for The New Yorker Magazines on the aftermath of the country that was completely destroyed. During the time Hersey was reporting, he found a document that eventually led him to a Jesuit missionary, a survivor of the bomb that was released onto Hiroshima. Later, Hersey had come face to face with many more survivors.

Hersey had gathered enough information to come up with a piece of writing about six survivors that influenced him the most: a widowed mother, two doctors, a priest, a worn out young woman who had worked at a factory, and a minister. I personally think Hersey's purpose in telling so many individual, pre-bomb anecdotes was to show us how things were before the bombing took place, the constant worry and look out of when they were going to get hit; they knew it was coming but they just didn't know when. He wanted us to see how each individual of the characters felt and about knowing that something was going to hit them. He wanted to give us a glimpse at what they were thinking and feeling through it all and to tell us what each of the characters were doing...