- Hersey, John Richard
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▪ 1994U.S. journalist and novelist (b. June 17, 1914, Tianjin [Tientsin], China—d. March 24, 1993, Key West, Fla.), as a foreign correspondent in East Asia, Italy, and Russia for Time and Life magazines (1937-46), was acclaimed for his poignant, documentary-style reports of the most momentous events of World War II. His A Bell for Adano (1944), a fictionalized account of the Allied occupation of a Sicilian town, captured the Pulitzer Prize; it was followed by his masterpiece, Hiroshima (1946), a dispassionate yet graphic nonfiction narrative of the effects of the atomic bomb explosion on six survivors. The latter work, though first scheduled for serialization in The New Yorker magazine, was so compelling that the editors unprecedentedly devoted the entire Aug. 31, 1946, issue to it. Hersey, the son of missionaries, lived in China until the age of 10, when he went to the U.S. After graduating from Yale University in 1936, he worked as a private secretary to Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis before securing a job with Time. His first book, Men on Bataan (1942), chronicled the heroic American efforts to hold the Philippines against the Japanese in 1941. He then published Into the Valley (1943), which explored from the American soldiers' perspective a skirmish during the battle between Allied and Japanese forces for control of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. (Hersey himself was commended by the U.S. secretary of the navy for bravery for helping to move wounded soldiers from the line of fire on Guadalcanal.) One of his best-known war novels was The Wall (1950), which described the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. That same year he began an association with his alma mater that lasted until 1984. Besides writing books of social criticism, Hersey was a sponsor of a 1965 March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam and was a member of a number of educational organizations. Some of the diverse themes of his later works included: the manipulation of gifted children in The Child Buyer (1960), racism in The Algiers Motel Incident (1968), and a Stradivarius violin in Antonietta (1991). His last collection of short stories, Key West Tales, was scheduled for 1994 publication.
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Universalium. 2010.