Hersey, John

Hersey, John (Richard)

(born June 17, 1914, Tianjin, China—died March 24, 1993, Key West, Fla., U.S.) Chinese-born U.S. novelist and journalist. Born to missionaries, he worked as a correspondent in East Asia, Italy, and the Soviet Union in the years 1937–46. His novel A Bell for Adano (1944, Pulitzer Prize) depicts the Allied occupation of a Sicilian town. Hiroshima (1946), about the experiences of atomic-blast survivors, and The Wall (1950), about the Warsaw ghetto uprisings, combine fact and fiction. His later novels encompassed a wide variety of subjects from contemporary issues to moral parables set in the future.

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Hersey, John (Richard) (1914–93) journalist, writer; born in Tientsin, China. His parents were missionaries and after his early education in China he attended Yale (B.A. 1936) and Clare College, Cambridge, England. He was briefly Sinclair Lewis's personal secretary (1937), then went to work as a journalist and editor for several New York magazines. During World War II he saw considerable action as a correspondent and he drew on his experiences for several of his works, including the novel A Bell for Adano (1944) (which also became a play and a movie). His greatest impact came from his documentary-style account, Hiroshima (1946), the first work to reveal to the general public the true horrors of a nuclear war. He taught at Yale for many years starting in 1950 and continued to publish his fiction and nonfiction.