John Hersey

John Richard Hersey (Tianjin, 1914 - Key West, Florida, 1993) was an American writer and journalist and one of the earliest practitioners of New Journalism, the approach that borrows the storytelling methods of fiction for factual reporting. The son of Protestant missionaries, he learned to speak Chinese before he learned English. His name is inseparable from Hiroshima, the piece that brought him international fame.

After studying at Yale and Cambridge, he worked for Time and covered the Second World War in Europe and Asia for Time and Life. After the war he went to Japan as a reporter for The New Yorker, where he met survivors of the atomic bombing. In 1946 the magazine published Hiroshima, which follows six people, among them a Jesuit priest, a widowed seamstress and two doctors. The issue was devoted almost entirely to the story, something the magazine had never done before. Decades later, a panel of specialists named it the finest American journalism of the twentieth century.

Hersey then turned mainly to fiction. A Bell for Adano, about the Allied occupation of Sicily, won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1945. He later wrote The Wall, presented as a rediscovered diary from the Warsaw Ghetto, and White Lotus, an alternate history in which white Americans are enslaved by the Chinese. His prose is clear and attentive to the feelings of ordinary people. From 1965 to 1970 he was master of Pierson College at Yale, where his early opposition to the Vietnam War made him controversial with some alumni and admired by many students.

His legacy rests above all on Hiroshima, often cited as a model of narrative reporting, and on the idea that the force of a historical event lies in the individual lives of those who lived through it.