Hiroshima Overview
John Hersey set out to bring a human face to the consequences of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and he recounts the stories and lives of six Japanese people affected by the bombing that is said to have killed 100,000 and left 40,000 injured. Hersey truly allows the reader to follow the lives of Toshiko Sasaki, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, Hatsuyo Nakamura, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki and Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto when he returned to Japan forty years later to find how their lives progressed in the aftermath of destruction.
Study Pack
The Hiroshima Study Pack contains:
Encyclopedia Articles (2)
778 words, approx. 3 pages
Hiroshima Guilt
On a warm summer morning above Hiroshima, Japan, an atomic bomb was for the first time dropped on a target as an act of war. The date was August 6, 1945. Less than a minute after the b...
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753 words, approx. 3 pages
Hiroshima, Japan
Hiroshima is a beautiful modern city located near the southwestern tip of the main Japanese island of Honshu. It had been a military center with the headquarters of the Japanese sou...
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John Hersey Biographies (6)
7,550 words, approx. 26 pages
Biography EssayIn 1950 John Hersey was considered one of the most promising young writers in the nation. His first novel, A Bell for Adano (1944), had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1945, while his journalis...
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7,032 words, approx. 24 pages
"I feel, often, as if I am making my life sketches not with a fine pen or a sharp pencil but with a thickish piece of charcoal," journalist and novelist John Hersey wrote in the introduction to Life S...
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6,137 words, approx. 21 pages
In 1950, John Hersey was considered one of the nation's most promising young writers. His first novel, A Bell for Adano (1944), had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1945, while his journalistic masterpiece of...
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7,343 words, approx. 25 pages
John Hersey, the author of more than a dozen novels as well as many sketches, commentaries, articles, and essays, has a well-earned reputation as one of America's most important novelists of the post-...
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10,260 words, approx. 35 pages
John Hersey earned early recognition, first as a reporter and then as a novelist. His dispatches from Guadalcanal and Sicily for the Henry Luce magazines Time and Life made him one of the best-known c...
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2,447 words, approx. 9 pages
In 1950 John Hersey's second novel, The Wall, established him as a fiction writer of some importance. Though his first novel, A Bell for Adano (1944), and a nonfiction account of atomic-bomb victims,...
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Essays & Analysis (1)
839 words, approx. 3 pages
August 6, 1945 at 8:15 a.m. the Enola Gay, an Air Force B-29 bomber flew over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. On board was a nuclear bomb that the US called Little Boy, ironically the Little Boy meant ...
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Hiroshima Guilt
Hiroshima, Japan
John Hersey
John Hersey
John (Richard) Hersey
