SOURCE: "John Hersey: War Correspondent into Novelist," in New Voices in American Studies, Purdue University Studies, 1966, pp. 49-58.
In the following essay, Sanders discusses Hersey's writing technique as it develops over his five World War II-related novels, including Hiroshima.
On May 8, 1945—V-E Day—John Hersey won the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, A Bell for Adano. Twenty years later, with the appearance of his eleventh book, White Lotus, he has been told that while he once aspired to have a silver tongue, he has been given instead a golden touch; that instead of writing literature for all time, he has written books that make the Book-of-the-Month Club. Hersey should not have been discouraged by such remarks. They might have been said of any recent American novelist who had published several widely read novels on subjects of immediate social or historical interest. These remarks are passingly ironic only because they were made by someone employed, as Hersey once was, by Time.
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