John Hersey

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

John Hersey
Key West, Florida
, US
Occupation
  • Journalist
  • novelist
  • professor
Notable worksHiroshima (1946)
Notable awardsPulitzer Prize for A Bell for Adano
Spouses
  • Frances Ann Cannon
    (m. 1940; div. 1958)
  • (m. 1959)
Children5[1]

John Richard Hersey (June 17, 1914 – March 24, 1993) was an American writer and journalist. He is considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reportage.[2] In 1999, Hiroshima, Hersey's account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, was adjudged the finest work of American journalism of the 20th century by a 36-member panel associated with New York University's journalism department.[3]

Background

Hersey was born in

Protestant missionaries for the YMCA in Tianjin. Hersey learned to speak Chinese before he spoke English. Later he based his novel, The Call (1985), on the lives of his parents and several other missionaries of their generation.[5]

John Hersey was a descendant of William Hersey (or Hercy, as the family name was then spelled) of Reading, Berkshire, England. William Hersey was one of the first settlers of Hingham, Massachusetts in 1635.[6]

Hersey returned to the United States with his family when he was ten years old. He attended public school in

Skull and Bones Society along with classmates Brendan Gill and Richard A. Moore.[10]
: 127 

Hersey lettered in football at Yale, where he was coached by Ducky Pond, Greasy Neale, and Gerald Ford. He was a teammate of Larry Kelley and Clint Frank, Yale's two Heisman Trophy winners.[11] He subsequently was selected as a Mellon Fellow for graduate study at the University of Cambridge.

Career

After his time at Cambridge, Hersey got a summer job as private secretary and driver for author Sinclair Lewis during 1937. He chafed at those duties, and that autumn he began work for Time,[12] for which he was hired after writing an essay on the magazine's dismal quality.[13] Two years later (1939) he was transferred to Time's Chongqing bureau. In 1940, William Saroyan lists him among "contributing editors" at Time in the play Love's Old Sweet Song.[14]

During World War II,

PT-109 that was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer. He led the rescue of his crew, personally towing the injured to safety.[16]
: 37 

After the war, during the winter of 1945–46, Hersey was in Japan, reporting for

Jesuit missionary who had survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The journalist visited the missionary, who introduced him to other survivors.[15]

Reporting from Hiroshima

Hiroshima in ruins, October 1945, two months after the atomic bomb exploded

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.

— Opening sentence, Hiroshima, John Hersey, 1946[13]

Soon afterward John Hersey began discussions with William Shawn, an editor for The New Yorker, about a lengthy piece on the previous summer's bombing. Hersey proposed a story that would convey the cataclysmic narrative through individuals who survived.

In May 1946, Hersey traveled to Japan, where he spent three weeks doing research and interviewing survivors. He returned to America during late June and began writing the stories of six Hiroshima survivors: a German Jesuit priest, a widowed seamstress, two doctors, a minister, and a young woman who worked in a factory.[17]

The resulting piece was his most notable work, the 31,000-word article "Hiroshima", which was published in the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker. The story dealt with the atomic bomb dropped on that Japanese city on August 6, 1945, and its effects on the six survivors. The article occupied almost the entire issue of the magazine – something The New Yorker had never done before.[17][18]

Later books and college master's job

Hersey often decried the

ascetic Hersey came to feel that some elements of the New Journalism of the 1970s were not rigorous enough about fact and reporting. After publication of Hiroshima, Hersey noted that "the important 'flashes' and 'bulletins' are already forgotten by the time yesterday morning's paper is used to line the trash can. The things we remember are emotions and impressions and illusions and images and characters: the elements of fiction."[19]

Soon after writing Hiroshima, the former war correspondent began publishing mostly fiction. Hersey's war novel The Wall (1950) was presented as a rediscovered journal recording the genesis and destruction of the

In 1950, during the Red Scare, Hersey was investigated by the FBI for possible Communist sympathies related to his past speeches and financial contributions, for example to the American Civil Liberties Union. The activities of his brother and other reporters were also investigated.[16]: 164 

His article "Why Do Students Bog Down on First R? A Local Committee Sheds Light on a National Problem: Reading" (1954), about the dullness of grammar school readers in an issue of Life magazine, inspired Dr. Seuss's children's story The Cat in the Hat. He also criticized the school system in his novel The Child Buyer (1960), a speculative fiction.

Hersey's first novel

Yangtze on a river junk during the 1920s. He learns that his romantic concepts of China brings disaster. In the novel White Lotus (1965), Hersey explores the African-American experience prior to civil rights, as reflected in an alternate history
in which white Americans are enslaved by the Chinese after losing "the Great War" to them.

Hersey wrote

Detroit, Michigan
, in July 1967.

From 1965 to 1970, Hersey was master of Pierson College, one of twelve residential colleges at Yale University. His outspoken activism and early opposition to the Vietnam War made him controversial with alumni but admired by many students.[24] After the trial of the Black Panthers in New Haven, Connecticut, Hersey wrote Letter to the Alumni (1970). He sympathetically addressed civil rights and anti-war activism – and attempted to explain them to sometimes aggravated alumni.

Hersey also pursued an unusual sideline: he operated the college's small letterpress printing operation, which he sometimes used to publish broadsides. During 1969 he printed an elaborate broadside of an Edmund Burke quote for Elting E. Morison, a Yale history professor and fellow residential college master.

For 18 years Hersey taught two writing courses, in fiction and non-fiction, to Yale undergraduates. Hersey taught his last class in fiction writing at Yale during 1984. In his individual sessions with undergraduates to discuss their work, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author was sometimes known to write his comments in the margin. After discussing his suggestion with the student, he would take out his pencil and erase the comment. As Master of Pierson College, he hosted his old boss

LSD
while supervised by a physician. Hersey later said that he was relieved that Luce had saved that particular revelation for a more private audience.

In 1969 Hersey donated the services of his bulldog 'Oliver' as mascot for the Yale football team, but he was concerned about his dog's interest level as Handsome Dan XI (the Yale bulldog's traditional name). Hersey wondered aloud "whether Oliver would stay awake for two hours."[25] That year, with the new mascot, the Yale team finished the season with a 7–2 record.

During 1985 John Hersey returned to Hiroshima, where he reported and wrote Hiroshima: The Aftermath, a follow-up to his original account. The New Yorker published Hersey's update in its July 15, 1985 issue. The article was subsequently appended to a newly revised edition of the book. "What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory", wrote Hersey. "The memory of what happened at Hiroshima".

Anne Fadiman described Hersey as a "compulsive plagiarist". For instance, she said he used complete paragraphs from the James Agee biography by Laurence Bergreen in his own New Yorker essay about Agee. She said that half of his book, Men on Bataan, came from work filed for Time by Melville Jacoby and his wife, Annalee Jacoby Fadiman.[26]

Death

A longtime resident of Vineyard Haven, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts – chronicled in his 1987 work Blues – John Hersey died at his winter home in

New York Times.[30] The writer was buried near his home on Martha's Vineyard.[31] He was survived by his second wife, Barbara Jean Day (the former wife of Hersey's colleague at The New Yorker, artist Charles Addams), Hersey's five children, one of whom is the composer and musician Baird Hersey, and six grandchildren. Barbara Hersey died on Martha's Vineyard 14 years later on August 16, 2007.[32]

Honors

On October 5, 2007, the United States Postal Service announced that it would honor five journalists of the 20th century with first-class rate postage stamps, to be issued on Tuesday, April 22, 2008:

managing editors meeting in Washington, D.C.

In 1968, John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, Illinois was named in his honor.

Soon before Hersey's death, then Acting President of Yale Howard Lamar decided the university should honor its long-serving alumnus. The result was the annual John Hersey Lecture, the first of which was delivered March 22, 1993, by historian and Yale graduate David McCullough, who noted Hersey's contributions to Yale but reserved his strongest praise for the former magazine writer's prose. Hersey had "portrayed our time", McCullough observed, "with a breadth and artistry matched by very few. He has given us the century in a great shelf of brilliant work, and we are all his beneficiaries."[33]

The John Hersey Prize at Yale was endowed during 1985 by students of the author and former Pierson College master. The prize is awarded to "a senior or junior for a body of journalistic work reflecting the spirit and ideals of John Hersey: engagement with moral and social issues, responsible reportage and consciousness of craftsmanship." Winners of the John Hersey Prize include David M. Halbfinger (Yale Class of 1990) and Motoko Rich (Class of 1991), who both later had reporting careers for The New York Times, and journalist Jacob Weisberg (Class of 1985), who would become editor-in-chief of The Slate Group.[34] Among Hersey's earlier students at Yale was Michiko Kakutani, formerly the chief book critic of The New York Times, as well as film critic Gene Siskel.

During his lifetime, Hersey served in many jobs associated with writing, journalism and education. He was the first non-academic named master of a Yale residential college. He was past president of the Authors League of America, and he was elected

The College of William and Mary and others.[35]

Works

Hersey's books include:

References

  1. ^ a b Severo, Richard (March 25, 1993). "John Hersey, Author of 'Hiroshima,' Is Dead at 78". The New York Times.
  2. . john hersey new journalism.
  3. ^ Felicity Barringer (March 1, 1999). "Journalism's Greatest Hits". The New York Times.
  4. ^ After their graduation from Syracuse University, Roscoe and Grace Hersey traveled to China to teach basketball and accounting, as well as Western medicine, education, science and agronomy.[1]
  5. ^ Hersey, John (1985). The Call. New York: Knopf.
  6. Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company; he died at Hingham in 1658. There is a monument to him in the Old Ship Burying Ground in Hingham.[2]
  7. ^ Dee, Jonathan (1986). "John Hersey, The Art of Fiction No. 92". The Paris Review. Vol. Summer-Fall 1986, no. 100. Retrieved October 24, 2013.
  8. .
  9. .
  10. .
  11. ^ Macht, Norman L. (2010). Football's Last Iron Men: 1934, Yale vs. Princeton, And One Stunning Upset. University of Nebraska Press. p. 153.
  12. .
  13. ^ a b Gates, David (April 5, 1993). "An All-American Foreigner". Newsweek.
  14. ^ Saroyan, William (1940). Love's Old Sweet Song: A Play in Three Acts. Samuel French. p. 72. Retrieved July 15, 2017.
  15. ^ a b "John Hersey, American Society of Authors and Writers".
  16. ^
    ISBN 9781982128517.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
  17. ^ a b Raphael, Caroline (August 22, 2016). "How John Hersey's Hiroshima revealed the horror of the bomb". Magazine. Retrieved August 27, 2016.
  18. ^ "Obituary of John Hersey". The New Yorker. April 5, 1993.
  19. ^ "Awakening a Sleeping Giant the Call", R. Z. Sheppard, TIME, May 6, 1985
  20. New York Times Fiction Best Seller List of 1950. See: John Bear
    , The No. 1 New York Times Best Seller: intriguing facts about the 484 books that have been #1 New York Times bestsellers since the first list, 50 years ago, Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1992, pp. 43–47
  21. ^ "Past Winners". Jewish Book Council. Retrieved January 19, 2020.
  22. ^ "How a Priest's Kid Won a Jewish Book Award, Jewcy.com".
  23. ^ "The Stanley Hillman Foundation Journalism Awards, hillmanfoundation.org". Archived from the original on January 29, 2009.
  24. ^ "Anxiety Behind the Facade". Time. June 23, 1967. Archived from the original on November 7, 2012. Retrieved May 6, 2010.
  25. ^ "People, Sports Illustrated, December 1, 1969". CNN. December 1, 1969. Retrieved May 6, 2010.
  26. ^ Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), pp. 109–11
  27. ISSN 0190-8286
    . Retrieved December 11, 2021.
  28. ^ "John Hersey | American author | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved December 11, 2021.
  29. ^ "John Hersey". The New Yorker. March 29, 1993. Retrieved December 11, 2021.
  30. ^ Yale University celebrated the former professor and writer's life at a memorial service at Battell Chapel in New Haven, where Yale President Howard Lamar and others spoke.[3]
  31. ^ Geraldine Brooks (February 2009). "The Vineyard in Winter". Smithsonian magazine. Archived from the original on September 9, 2012.
  32. ^ "Obituaries". The Martha's Vineyard Times. August 23, 2007. Archived from the original on November 22, 2008.
  33. ^ "A Life in Writing: John Hersey, 1914–1993". Yale Alumni Magazine. October 1993. Archived from the original on October 18, 2008.
  34. ^ "2004: The Yale Endowment" (PDF).
  35. .
  36. .
  37. ^ Alfred A. Knopf, New York

Further reading

  • Lesley M. M. Blume (2020). Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World. Simon & Schuster. .

External links