Hersey’s graphic and gut-wrenching descriptions of the misery he encountered in Hiroshima offered what officials could not: the human cost of the bomb. They could not depend on censored materials from the US Occupying Force in Japan to accurately present the wreckage of the atomic blast. ![]() Hersey was determined to present a real and raw image of the impact of the bomb to American readers. He spent three weeks in May of 1946 on assignment for The New Yorker interviewing survivors of the atomic attacks and returned home where he began to write what would become “Hiroshima.” Hersey won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel A Bell For Adano (a story of the Allied occupation of a town in Sicily) in 1944, and his talents for fiction inspired his later nonfiction writing. Shortly after, he began a career as a foreign correspondent for Time and Life magazines and covered current events in Asia, Italy, and the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1946. Born in Tientsin, China in 1914 to missionary parents, Hersey later returned to the states and graduated from Yale University in 1936. Hersey was both a respected reporter and a gifted novelist, two occupations that provided him with the skills and compassion necessary to write his extensive essay on Hiroshima. ![]() But Hersey’s account focused on the human toll of the bombs and the individual stories of six survivors of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima rather than statistics. Stories and newsreels provided details of the attacks: the numbers wounded and dead, the staggering estimated costs-numerically and culturally-of property lost, and some of the visual horrors. Hersey was certainly not the first journalist to report on the aftermath of the bombs. Theirs was a weighty introduction to wartime reporter John Hersey’s four-chapter account of the wreckage of the atomic bomb, but such a warning was necessary for the stories of human suffering The New Yorker’s readers would be exposed to. ![]() Truman had ordered the use of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a year earlier, the staff at The New Yorker believed that “few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.” On August 31, 1946, the editors of The New Yorker announced that the most recent edition “will be devoted entirely to just one article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb.” Though President Harry S.
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