John (Richard) Hersey Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on John (Richard) Hersey

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-World War II period, but it is his work as a journalist that comprises his most significant legacy to American literature of the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, his nonfiction account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, which awakened America to the human consequences of nuclear warfare, is significant both as a literary accomplishment and as a cultural event. Hiroshima, first published in August 1946 and reissued in 1985 with an update on the fates of its characters, is often cited as a seminal example of the nonfiction novel in America, a predecessor of the genre later developed and refined by Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and other so-called New Journalists. Hersey's account of the lives of six survivors of the world's first atomic bombing of a major city helped America take its first halting steps toward coming to terms with the significance of what it had done to end World War II.

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