Hiroshima By John Hersey

A Timeline Leading to the Bombing of Hiroshima Link to NPR timeline of the events leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima.

John Hersey-Author Background He was born in China to Protestant missionaries. Chinese was his first language. He returned to the U.S. at age 10 and eventually attended Yale University He was hired by Time magazine after sending them an essay about the publication’s poor quality of writing.

John Hersey-Author Background As a war correspondent from 1939 to 1945, he was with the troops for the invasion of Sicily, survived four airplane crashes, and helped evacuate soldiers in Guadalcanal He wrote several books related to his experiences as a war correspondent.

How the book came to be After the war, during the winter of 1945-6, Hersey was in Japan, reporting for the New Yorker on the reconstruction of the devastated country, when he found a document written by a Jesuit missionary (This was Father Kleinsorge.) who had survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The journalist visited the missionary, who introduced him to the other survivors. He came back in the spring of 1946 for three weeks to conduct interviews of the six survivors.

The impact of Hersey’s editorial The editors of The New Yorker original planned to include his account in serial form over a number of issues. After they read the manuscript, however, they decided to devote an entire issue to Hersey’s story, which was unprecedented. The issue’s publication on August 31, 1946, caused a near frenzy. It sold out in a few hours, and The New Yorker was overwhelmed with requests for reprints. Eventually Hersey turned his editorial into the book you are reading today.

Hiroshima: “The Aftermath” In 1985, Hersey returned to Hiroshima and wrote “The Aftermath,” a follow-up on the survivors, which was published in The New Yorker and then added to his book. In discussing the writing of Hiroshima, Hersey said, “I felt that I would like to write about what happened, not to buildings, but to human beings.”