John Hersey’s Hiroshima stands at the head of this tradition. These 31,000 words of searing testimony were written and published just a year after the dropping of the first A-bomb on Japan in August 1945, a terrible act of war that killed 100,000 men, women and children and marked the beginning of a dark new chapter in human history.Hiroshima was the result of an inspired commission about an event of global significance from a renowned war correspondent by a magazine editor of genius. It was in the spring of 1946 that William Shawn, the celebrated managing editor of the New Yorker, and protege of its founder Harold Ross, invited his star reporter, John Hersey, to visit postwar Japan for an article about a country recovering from the shattering experience of the atomic bomb. The piece was intended to be a standard four-parter about Japan’s ruined cities and devastated lives nine months on from the country’s humiliating unconditional surrender.ADVERTISING Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Hersey driving a US army jeep in 1944. Photograph: APOn the Pacific sea voyage to Japan, however, Hersey chanced on a copy of Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the tale of five people who are crossing an Inca rope bridge in Peru when it collapses, for which Wilder had won a Pulitzer prize. Accordingly, Hersey decided to focus his narrative on the lives of a few chosen Hiroshima witnesses. As soon as he reached the ravaged city, he found six survivors of the bombing whose personal narratives captured the horror of the tragedy from the awful moment of the explosion. This gave Hersey his opening sentence, a unique point of view, and a narrative thread through a chaotic and overwhelming mass of material. In a style later developed and popularised by the “new journalism” of the 1960s, the opening of Hiroshima pitches the reader into the heart of the story, from the viewpoint of one of its victims:
Source: The 100 best nonfiction books: No 34 – Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946) | Books | The Guardian









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