John Richard Hersey

John Richard Hersey , 1914-93, American author, b. China, grad. Yale, 1936. Reflecting his experiences as a war correspondent in World War II, many of his writings are concerned with the problem of intolerance and inhumanity. His first novel, A Bell for Adano (1944; Pulitzer Prize), depicts the American occupation of a rural town in war-torn Italy. Later novels include The Wall (1950), about the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto against the Nazis; The War Lover (1959); The Child Buyer (1960); Letter to the Alumni (1970); The Conspiracy (1972); and Antonietta (1991). His nonfiction works include Hiroshima (1946), a powerful report of the effects of atomic bombing; The Algiers Motel Incident (1968), concerning an occurrence in the 1967 Detroit race riot; and Blues (1987), about fishing. Collections of his short stories include Fling and Other Stories (1990) and his last, Key West Tales (1994).

Bibliography: See studies by D. Sanders (1967) and N. L. Huse (1983).

Hersey, John [Richard] (1914–93), born in Tianjin, China, of American missionary parents, was educated in China, the U.S. (Yale, 1936), and England. He was Sinclair Lewis's secretary (1937), became a correspondent for Time, and wrote books about events in World War II: Men on Bataan (1942), Into the Valley (1943), and Hiroshima (1946). His novels, also using a documentary technique, include A Bell for Adano (1944, Pulitzer Prize), about the early days of Allied rule in a Sicilian village; The Wall (1950; dramatized, 1961, by Millard Lampell), about the ill‐fated uprising in Warsaw's ghetto against the Nazis; The Marmot Drive (1953), a symbolic tale of depraved New Englanders ridding a valley of woodchucks; A Single Pebble (1956), contrasting Occidental and Oriental ways of life in a story about an American engineer in China; The War Lover (1959), an antiwar appeal in the tale of a U.S. pilot in World War II who becomes enamored of his experiences; The Child Buyer (1960), a satirical parable about modern education, which tells of a governmental buyer of brilliant children later used as thinking machines, dramatized by Paul Shyre (1964); White Lotus (1965), a parable of race relations, treating a mythical Oriental land in which white people are enslaved; Too Far To Walk (1966), a tract‐like tale of New England college students self‐indulgently seeking experience; Under the Eye of the Storm (1967), a symbolic tale of two couples aboard the boat Harmony as a hurricane sweeps them to sea; The Conspiracy (1972), an epistolary telling of the Pisonian uprising against Nero; My Petition for More Space (1974), the attempt of a man to gain better living conditions in a future overpopulated and overregulated U.S.; The Walnut Door (1977), treating two young people caught in the failure of their idealism; and The Call (1985), about an innocent young American boy who becomes a missionary in China. Fling (1990) collects 11 short stories. Here To Stay (1963) collects Hiroshima and eight other “studies in human tenacity.” Later nonfiction includes The Algiers Motel Incident (1968), about an episode in the Detroit racial riots of 1967; Letter to the Alumni (1970), a discussion of dissidence and other problems of students at Yale, where he was affiliated with the faculty; The President (1975), an account of a week spent with Gerald Ford, revised, with a profile of Truman, as Aspects of the Presidency (1980); and Blues (1987), treating angling for bluefish off Cape Cod. Life Sketches (1989) collects some brief published pieces. Key West Tales (1994) prints 15 short stories completed shortly before the author's death.