Portrait of John Hersey
BY Carl Van Vechten
Library of Congress
Prints & Photographs Division
Carl Van Vechten Collection
(LC-USZ62-54231)

In 1944 Hersey wrote, in three weeks, A Bell for Adano, based on people he had met and interviewed while covering the war in Italy, and featured events involving General George Patton. For his efforts, Hersey was awarded the 1945 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. It was his first effort at fictionalizing historical events and characters, and sharpened his storytelling skills. These too would be tested to the limit in Hiroshima.

Before he wrote A Bell for Adano, he joined a Marine combat unit’s assault on the island of Guadalcanal and spent some time on the aircraft carrier Hornet. He left the ship five days before it was sunk. While onboard he interviewed an airman who was rescued after his plane crashed into the sea while returning from the April 1942 Doolittle raid on Tokyo. The Sino-American Aviation Heritage Foundation has reported that the Japanese tortured and killed as many as 250,000 Chinese after the Doolittle raid because they “might” have aided the American airmen who flew to China after dropping their bombs.

If the carnage he had witnessed first hand and the stories he had learned from combatants had not further embittered him against the Japanese, it would seem nothing would. But Hersey was a complex man and had the ability to set aside his animosity, against the Italians when he wrote A Bell… and later for the Japanese when he wrote Hiroshima. This single quality marks him as both a great journalist and humanitarian. It also allowed him to set aside his hatred for the Japanese civilians, who were devastated by the bomb that virtually leveled their city.

Next I learned, from a biography on Ross by Thomas Kunkel (Genuis in Disguise, Harold Ross of the New Yorker, Random House, 1995), the backdrop for Hersey’s assignment to write about Hiroshima and the affects of the atomic bomb. Kunkel notes that it had been about nine months since the bomb had been dropped (August 6) when the decision was made to hire Hersey. Although thousands of words had been written about the bombing, editor William Shawn realized that “no one had written a human prospective of the event.” He wired Hersey in Shanghai: “the more time that passes, the more convinced we are that piece has wonderful possibilities.” Ross reportedly told E. B. White that Shawn “wants to wake people up and (he) says we are the people to do it.”

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
First Edition Cover
BY Thornton Wilder
(Albert & Charles Boni, 1927)

(Hersey originally composed his text in four parts assuming it would be published serially. Ross, when he read it, decided to publish it in a single issue. Ross was notorious for his attention to detail, and sometimes, according to Hersey, “hovered over a single word…(He) quibbled with the description of some of the bicycles near ground zero as ‘lopsided’. Asked Ross, can something that is two-dimensional be ‘lopsided’?” It was changed to ‘crumpled.’”)

Then fate intervened and, I believe, provided Hersey with his greatest rhetorical guidelines. This occurred when he was traveling aboard a U. S. Navy destroyer in the Pacific. He became ill and found in the ship’s library a copy of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder’s fictional account of the death of five random people who happened to be on a bridge when it collapsed in Peru. Wilder’s work clearly had an immense impact on Hersey. After all, Wilder and Hersey both attended Yale, both were raised in China, both had been awarded the Pulitzer for fiction, and both constructed narratives about disaster befalling random, innocent people. Wilder’s work is divided into five parts; Hersey’s into four. Wilder’s text is 117 pages, Hersey’s 90.