From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Hersey, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1958

John Richard Hersey (June 17, 1914 – March 24, 1993) was an American writer and journalist. Born in Tientsin, China, to missionaries Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey, his family returned to the United States when he was ten years old. Hersey attended the Hotchkiss School, followed by Yale University and graduate study as a Mellon Fellow at Cambridge. He obtained a summer job as a secretary for Sinclair Lewis in the summer of 1937, and, that fall, started work at Time. Two years later he was transferred to Time 's Chungking bureau. During World War II he covered the fighting in both Europe (Sicily) and Asia (Battle of Guadalcanal), writing articles for Time, Life, and The New Yorker. His writings during this time included "Men on Bataan", "Into the Valley", and A Bell for Adano.

His most notable work was "Hiroshima", a story for The New Yorker about the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on that Japanese city on August 6, 1945. The article, which tells the story of six victims of the bombing, was later turned into a book. His article about the dullness of grammar school readers in a 1954 issue of Time was the inspiration for The Cat in the Hat. Hersey also wrote The Algiers Motel Incident, about racist killings by the police during the 12th Street Riot in Detroit, Michigan, in 1968, and A Bell for Adano, which won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1945. Hersey is also known for his pseudo-chronicle, A Single Pebble, about a young American engineer traversing upstream Yangtze.

Hersey was the Master of Pierson College, one of the twelve residential colleges at Yale University, from 1965 to 1970. He taught two writing courses, in fiction and non-fiction, to undergraduates.

Hersey died at home in Key West, Florida, on March 24, 1993. He was survived by his wife, Barbara, his five children, and six grandchildren.

• Into the Valley: A Skirmish of the Marines (1942) (published as a book in 1943)
• A Bell for Adano (1944)
• Hiroshima (published as a book in 1946)
• The Wall (1950)
• The War Lover (1959)
• The Child Buyer (1960)
• White Lotus (1965)
• Too Far To Walk (1966)
• Under the Eye of the Storm (1967)
• The Algiers Motel Incident (1968)
• Letter to the Alumni (1970)
• The Conspiracy: A Novel (1972)
• My Petition For More Space (1974)
• The Walnut Door (1977)
• The Call (1985)
• Blues (1987)
• Antonietta (1991)
• Key West Tales (1993)

• "Hiroshima" by John Hersey
• John Hersey High School
• Photos of the first edition of In A Bell for Adano