John Hersey was an American writer and journalist who helped pioneer a new kind of literary nonfiction and whose account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima ranks among the most influential works of reporting of the twentieth century. Born in China to missionary parents, he spent his early childhood there before his family returned to the United States, and he was educated at Yale.
He began his career as a journalist, covering the Second World War as a correspondent in Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe. His wartime reporting and his early books, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Bell for Adano, established his reputation as a gifted chronicler of the war and its human dimensions.
His masterpiece appeared in 1946. Sent to Japan, Hersey told the story of the Hiroshima bombing through the experiences of six survivors, in spare, restrained, deeply human prose. The resulting work, Hiroshima, filled an entire issue of The New Yorker and was published as a book that became a worldwide sensation, bringing home to readers the human reality of nuclear war as no statistics could. It is often cited as a founding work of literary journalism.
Hersey continued to write novels and works of nonfiction for decades, often addressing questions of conscience, justice, and the abuse of power, and he taught at Yale. A modest man who shunned the limelight, he remained a respected literary figure until his death in 1993, his Hiroshima still read as a moral landmark.