Who is john hersey

These were sometimes written by novelists like Stephen Crane and William Faulkner, who found ways to make the author disappear, both as a character encountering people and as a voice offering judgments. Hersey obliterated that. Hersey himself, oddly, used the technique relatively seldom during his subsequent career.

He kept experimenting with form, but never as successfully. Like many journalists with a literary bent, Hersey convinced himself that his real calling was fiction. Many of them involve in-depth research delivered through some kind of overdesigned formal device.

Treglown is a thorough biographer, and a kindhearted one. There are more than a hundred boxes of Hersey papers in the archives at Yale. Treglown appears to have read through all of them, plus a lot of related material. Treglown shows us a long procession of gentle interventions in which editors at Knopf and The New Yorker tried to steer Hersey back toward journalism, with only intermittent success.

Reviewers often found his novels fact-stuffed, overexplained, didactic, and lacking in vibrancy and humor. It demonstrates his astonishing talent for eliciting oral history and forensically reconstructing the experiences of people who have endured a major disaster. His major gripe was that nonfiction writers had begun blurring the line between fact and fiction. What had so nettled Hersey?

There are other journalistic sins besides invention, of course. Hersey, by the later stages of his career, was at pains to counter what he perceived as an underrating of his fiction because of his work as a journalist. But he was understandably loath to admit that his early work had been his strongest, and his disapproval of what latter-day nonfiction novelists had made of his inventions prevented him from taking pride in his enormous contribution to the techniques of journalism.

The relationship between fiction and nonfiction is like the one between art and architecture: fiction is pure, nonfiction is applied. But narrative journalism is far from artless. Hersey and Wolfe were given to issuing restrictive obiter dicta about nonfiction writing. Hersey regularly demonstrated this himself. Journalists can write historical or social narratives with style and brio while maintaining fidelity to the record.

Book-length journalism is a capacious discipline. Over the years, he moved about as far left as you could get while remaining a member of the establishment. He never quite gave up trying to lend his morally concerned fiction the texture of veracity.

During the summer of , Hersey was a secretary and gofer for Sinclair Lewis. He left that employment in the fall to apprentice at Time magazine, a business relationship that would extend through In , he returned to China as a war correspondent at the Chungking bureau of Time. In this capacity, he traveled throughout China and Japan, sending dispatches of military action and interviewing important leaders. Hersey married twice during his lifetime and had four children.

This marriage ended in divorce in He later married Barbara Day Addams Kaufman. They had a daughter, Brook. Hersey published two books in and Men on Bataan and Into the Valley. Men on Bataan is an account of the fighting in the Philippines. It contains fifty stories of enlisted men, as well as chapters about General MacArthur. The book, which received positive reviews, reveals Hersey's concerns with how democracy could function in a time of war.

Hersey's experience in the South Pacific and at the Battle of the Solomons led to his month-long stay on Guadalcanal. He experienced war firsthand and saw the terrible hardships that were placed on the fighting men. For helping evacuate the wounded, Hersey later received a letter of commendation from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. Into the Valley , published in , is about the experiences of the fighting men in the Pacific Theater. Here, Hersey studied the combat soldier's reaction to danger, the war, and the enemies.

He began a theme that would continue throughout his career: his study of why and how men survived under terrible conditions. Survival became a key idea in his thinking and writing. From to , Hersey worked out of Sicily and Russia. During this time, many of his writings for Life magazine were about returning veterans, the victims of war, and the occupation troops. He also wrote about John F. Kennedy's heroic experience with the PT , continuing his interest in survival under harsh conditions.

It is the story of a small, occupied village in Italy that is temporarily run by Major Victor Joppolo, the military governor and a man of Italian descent, who tries to teach democratic ideals to the villagers. Joppolo attempts to retrieve the town's missing bell, which had rung in the steeple for years. Various town characters appear, and General Marvin, the antagonist of the story, thwarts Joppolo in his efforts.

While some see Marvin as a thinly veiled George S. Patton, others interpret him as an example of the dangers of modern corporate society or the nation state, running operations with expediency at a cost to individual freedoms.

Hersey developed his story after studying the work of a military governor for an article for Life. His novel is a hymn to the common man who steps up to a position where he can help people.

An example of democracy in action, Hersey's story was turned into both a Broadway play and a motion picture. In , he published Hiroshima first in its entirety in the New Yorker on August 31, and later as a novel in October. Based on the explosion of the first nuclear bomb in , the novel attempts to take the extraordinary and inexplicable event and show how it impacts ordinary human lives.

It personalized the event so that Americans, as well as a worldwide audience, could begin to understand the repercussions of the bombing. The s saw four more books from Hersey, beginning with The Wall in Hersey had seen the German concentration camps in Estonia and the Warsaw ruins where , Jews had died. His book confronted the ability of man to deal with totalitarian governments and posed the question, "Can man be morally responsible for himself? In , he published The Marmot Drive, a novel about New England that studied modern lives cut off from the traditions of the past.

It received poor reviews. A Single Pebble, published in , was about the journey of a young American engineer up the Yangtze River during the s. It allowed Hersey to consider his relationship as a modern American with the Orient. In , Hersey published The War Lover, continuing a theme of the paradox of those who love war and fight an enemy within.

The dilemma is how can a man so love to make war and kill but also learn a natural reverence for life? Admiration for a man's will to survive instead of a love of killing is what finally comes through in Hiroshima. By , Hersey turned his efforts to education, racism, and the disenchantment of 's students.

He wrote The Child Buyer in , a novel that reflected some of the educational thinking of that time.