John Hersey

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John Hersey : biography

June 17, 1914 – March 24, 1993

Later books and college master’s job

[[Harkness Tower, Yale University.]]

Hersey himself often decried the New Journalism, which in many ways he had helped create. He would have probably disagreed with a description of his article on the effects of the atomic bomb as New Journalism. Later 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."

Shortly before writing Hiroshima, Hersey published his novel Of Men and War, an account of war stories seen through the eyes of soldiers rather than a war correspondent. One of the stories in Hersey’s novel was inspired by President John F. Kennedy and the PT-109. Soon afterward the former war correspondent began publishing mostly fiction. During 1950 Hersey’s novel The Wall was published, an account presented as a rediscovered journal recording the genesis and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of the Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The book won the National Jewish Book Award during the second year of that award’s existence; it also received the Sidney Hillman Foundation Journalism Award.

His article about the dullness of grammar school readers in a 1954 issue of Life magazine, "Why Do Students Bog Down on First R? A Local Committee Sheds Light on a National Problem: Reading" was the inspiration for Dr. Seuss’s juvenile story The Cat in the Hat. Further criticisms of the school system came with "The Child Buyer" (1960), a speculative-fiction novel. Hersey also wrote The Algiers Motel Incident, about a racially-motivated shooting by police during the 12th Street Riot in Detroit, Michigan, during 1968. Hersey’s first novel A Bell for Adano, about the Allied occupation of a Sicilian town during World War II, won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1945, andwas adapted into the 1945 movie A Bell for Adano directed by Henry King, featuring John Hodiak and Gene Tierney. His 1956 short novel, A Single Pebble is the tale of a young American engineer traveling up the Yangtze on a river junk during the 1920s and discovering that his romantic concepts of China bring disaster.

From 1965–70, Hersey was Master of Pierson College, one of twelve residential colleges at Yale University, where his outspoken activism and early opposition to the Vietnam War made him controversial with alumni, but admired by many students. After the trial of the Black Panthers in New Haven, Connecticut, Hersey wrote Letter to the Alumni (1970), in which the former Yale College master 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 printing an elaborate broadside of an Edmund Burke quote for Yale history professor and fellow residential college master Elting E. Morison.

A Bell for Adano first edition cover (1944).

For 18 years Hersey also taught two writing courses, in fiction and non-fiction, to 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, and having discussed his suggestion with the student, to then take out his pencil and erase his comment. As Master of Pierson College, he subsequently hosted his old boss Henry Luce – with whom Hersey had become reconciled after their dispute years prior – when Luce spoke to the college’s undergraduates. After Luce’s somnolent speech, the former publisher privately revealed to Hersey for the first time that he and his wife Clare Boothe Luce had experimented with LSD while supervised by a physician. Time founder Luce was a notoriously dull public speaker, and his address to the Pierson undergraduates was no exception. Afterwards, Luce confided to Hersey the results of the LSD experimental ‘trips’ in which the publisher and his wife had participated. Hersey later confessed he was relieved that Luce had saved that particular revelation for a more private audience.

During 1969 Hersey donated the services of his bulldog ‘Oliver’ as mascot for the Yale football team. Making his debut during the autumn of 1969, Handsome Dan XI (the Yale bulldog’s traditional name) had Hersey concerned about the dog’s interest level. A football fan himself, Hersey had wondered aloud "whether Oliver would stay awake for two hours." With a new mascot, the sometimes hapless 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 story. The New Yorker published Hersey’s update in its July 15, 1985, issue, and 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".

John Hersey has been called a "compulsive plagiarist." For instance, he used complete paragraphs from the James Agee biography by Laurence Bergreen in his own New Yorker essay about Agee. Half of his book, Men on Bataan came from work filed for Time by Melville Jacoby and his wife.Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), pp. 109-11