Author Spotlight: John Hersey

     John Hersey was born in 1914 in Tientsin China, the son of Christian missionaries. He attended Yale University, where he lettered in football, and then he did graduate work at the University of Cambridge. After a brief stint as Sinclair Lewis' personal secretary, he began working for Time  magazine. During World War II, he accompanied Allied troops in Europe and in the Pacific, survived four airplane crashes, and he was awarded a commendation from the Secretary of the Navy for helping to evacuate wounded soldiers from Guadalcanal. His most famous works are about events of WWII.

    He's often cited as one of the founders of what came to be called "New Journalism", writing non-fiction using literary techniques often used in fiction, akin to creative non-fiction. In fact, he didn't care much for the "New Journalism" label, usually calling his work storytelling instead. He died in 1993 in Key West, Florida, in a compound he and his wife shared with Invisible Man author, Ralph Ellison. 

    He was extremely prolific, publishing dozens of books. Here are just a few:

    The novel A Bell for Adano, published in 1945 was his first great literary success, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and being adapted into a play and a movie. It's the story of an Italian-American major in World War II who works to replace the 700 year old church bell from a little Italian village. The original bell had been melted down by the Fascists for making rifle barrels. 

    In 1945 and 1946, Hersey was in Japan covering the American occupation. While there, he discovered a document written by a Jesuit missionary who had witnessed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. After meeting the missionary, he was introduced to other witnesses. He chose six survivors and wrote their stories. They were first published in New Yorker magazine before being published in a book, Hiroshima. Because of the secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project and the development of atomic bombs, this was the first account of the effects of the bomb that Americans had ever read. It became an immediate best seller, both in magazine and book form. Radio stations and networks read excerpts on the air. 

    In 1950, he published The Wall, the account of Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto and of the Ghetto Uprising. It's another novel, based on fact but using fictional characters and written as if it was a discovered journal. 

    Before A Bell for Adano, Hersey published two books about the Pacific theater, Men on Bataan and Into the Valley, first-hand accounts of the battles in the Philippines and Guadalcanal.

    In the late 1960s, he wrote The Algiers Motel Incident about the 1967 Detroit race riots and police brutality and Letter to the Alumni after a trial of Black Panther members in New Haven Connecticut. In Letter, he sympathetically addressed the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. White Lotus is an alternate history novel in which Americans are enslaved by the Chinese, meant to bring attention to issues of race, oppression, and slavery in America.