John Hersey

John Hersey (1914-1993), American author and journalist, noted for his ability to portray on an individual level the tragedies of war. John Richard Hersey was born in Tianjin (Tientsin), China, and educated at Yale University and Clare College of the University of Cambridge. During World War II (1939-1945) Hersey served as a Time magazine war correspondent in the Pacific and Europe. He later was a senior editor of Life magazine. Hersey wrote Men on Bataan (1942) and Into the Valley (1943), vivid accounts of the war in the Pacific, and A Bell for Adano (1944; Pulitzer Prize, 1945), a novel about the Allied occupation of Italy. Hiroshima (1946) is a graphic report on the atomic bombing of that Japanese city; a new edition with an additional chapter written 40 years after the explosion was published in 1985. The Wall (1950) is a novel about the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw, Poland, ghetto in 1943 (see Holocaust), and The Algiers Motel Incident (1968) is a nonfiction treatment of the riots in Detroit, Michigan, in 1967. Hersey's other works include the novels The Child Buyer (1960), The Walnut Door (1977), and Blues (1987). The Call (1985) is a semiautobiographical story of an American missionary in China.