John Richard Hersey was born 17 June 1914 in Tientsin, China, the youngest son of Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey, who had come to China in 1905 as YMCA missionaries during the great "Social Gospel" wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hersey attended British and American schools in China until 1925 when his father became ill with encephalitis during a trip on a mule cart through a famine-stricken region of China, forcing the family to return to the United States to seek medical treatment. Hersey's father eventually died from the illness, and Hersey later struggled to come to terms with the significance of the family's sacrifice to a cause that he had come to view in morally ambiguous terms.
Hersey entered Yale in 1932 and worked as a writer on the Yale Daily News. He played football under the direction of a recent Yale graduate and rookie coach, Gerald Ford, whom Hersey met again nearly forty years later in the Oval Office while gathering material for a book on the presidency.
This is a free page. This page contains 161 words. This
biography contains 7,359 words (approx. 25 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our John (Richard) Hersey Access Pass.
