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 correspondents in World War II. As the war was ending, his first novel, A Bell for Adano (1944), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In 1946 his interviews with six survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima were the peak of his reporting and for the rest of his long career as a writer his most widely known publication. As a journalist after 1946, he wrote occasionally for The New Yorker and other publications and was moved to write at greater length about an incident in the Detroit race riot of 1967. But, for more than fifty years following the unexpected Pulitzer, he was primarily a novelist. Given the singular procession of his fiction from his second...