He was always likely to pursue a new subject and a different form. Hersey's fourteen novels reflect not only an unusually wide range of subjects--from the war he covered as a young reporter to the fanciful travels of a Stradivarius violin--but also his persistent examination of the differences between fiction and journalism.
John Richard Hersey was born on 17 June 1914 in Tientsin, China, the youngest of three sons of Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey, missionaries affiliated with the YMCA. The family lived in the British Concession, which the boys left each day to attend Tientsin Grammar School and later Tientsin American School. While Roscoe Hersey served in France in World War I with a detachment of Chinese coolies, John traveled around the world with his mother and stayed briefly with family in Briarcliff Manor, New York. Returning to Tientsin in time to begin his formal education, he picked up additional fluency in Mandarin. Despite the wartime interruption, Hersey's first eleven years marked him as a "mishkid," a missionary's child, a foreigner who behaved much as the Chinese expected him to, but a foreigner still in the American society to which the family returned when Roscoe Hersey's illness forced him to retire from missionary service.
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