A Life Full Of Writing:

A Life Filled With Writing: John Hersey, 1914-1993

"The historian, if honest, gives us a photograph; the storyteller gives us a painting."

"Historical Fiction for our Global Times", Leon Garfield

 

John (Richard) Hersey, born June 17, 1914, in Tienstin, China, became one of America’s skilled news reporters of World War II and a contemporary historical novelist before he died on March 24, 1993 in Key West, Florida. One may assume that the history of his early years living in China might have produced a literary artist that focused on his missionary childhood with personal experience forming a positive racial identity as a social outsider. However, it appears the habits he focused on developing being a reporter during World War II—using direct observation, memory, and research—laid the groundwork for becoming a novelist of contemporary history. Hersey stated, "Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it…The novel of contemporary history is an established form. It has dignity, purpose, and separateness" (Something about the Author, 139). Hersey’s own words not only describe his production of the historically based novel, The Wall, they ell of the type of life he had chosen to live.

The son of Roscoe, a Y. M. C. A. secretary in China, and Grace Hersey, a missionary, he and his family returned to the United States in 1925. John Hersey began attending Yale University in 1932, became a vice-chairman of the Yale Daily News, writing music criticism with a sensitive, and learned ear, graduating with a BA in 1936. He gained further education at Clare College of the University of Cambridge. "He had to find his particular path as a writer, and as a Mellon Fellow at Cambridge—and as personal secretary to Sinclair Lewis, ’07, then at the height of his fame—John waited and watched" (Heckscher, 2).

In October 1937, Hersey went to work at Time Magazine, believing this magazine was "the liveliest enterprise of its type" (Sanders, 303). After eighteen months in New York, he became educated in Timestyle and in the unique type of the magazine’s "World Affairs" editing and was sent to the China bureau in Chungking.

Hersey’s travels to China and Japan, to the South Pacific warfare, to the Sicilian campaign, and to Moscow produced reports that were noted for their quiet authority and unemotional facts. "All assignments required the reposter’s instant adaptation to the day’s new scene, no matter how much it might differ from the scene of the day before. Hersey, fresh from listening to Chiang Kai-shek’s plan to win the war, could shift easily to write about Ambassador Grew’s policy to ‘dynamic appeasement’" (Sanders, 303).

While working four and a half years for Time, Hersey compiled enough information from interviews and letters from serviceman who had been on Baaton to write the book Men on Baaton, published in June 1944. "You ought to know [these men] for they are like you," Hersey wrote in Chapter Two, "They have reacted as you will react when your crisis come, splendidly and worthily, with no more mistakes than necessary." His truthful reporting of America’s defeat during that battle was reviewed by Fletcher Pratt in an issue of The Saturday Review of Literature. Pratt stated "it was literature that will not be read with shame after the war."

When assigned to Guadalcanal in 1942, Hersey was able to personally observe the third battle of the Matanikukau River. From these observations, he wrote his next book, Into the Valley, published in 1943. It has been reported that Hersey was present when a company was under sniper attack, when a false rumor of retreat had been passed from man to man with false emotional relief, and that he participated in the carrying of a stretcher holding a man with a mortal wound. These things he shared with readers, displaying open and honest reporting. Although Hersey would never again obtain another direct view of combat, his interviews with survivors of the combat, such as Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, assisted him greatly on further expanding his spectacular experiences viewing the war.

Hersey’s next reporting assignments included the Solomons, Sicily, and Russia. American men in all of the fighting services were interviewed. Many of the war’s civilian members were also met with. He continually reported on World War II activities that revolved around occupation, liberation, and rehabilitation.

Frequently John Hersey’s assignments focused on war aims and the fighters’ morale. For the 1943 issue of the magazine, Life, Hersey was assigned to write an article that accompanied a group of drawings done by the magazine’s overseas artists. He included these words:

For American soldiers, who know their duty when they see it but who love life so very much, the Japanese warrior code is beginning to be a thing of pity. It says "Duty is weightier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather." The Marines who fought on Guadalcanal wanted only to live to fight victoriously another day and after the fight, to be happy and relaxed and American for many other days.

Sanders states, "This observation lying so close to the real questions of life and death in wartime faintly anticipates what he would write years later about survival and tenacity…" (304).

Six weeks after writing a story about the actions of an American military governor in Sicily for Life magazine, John Hersey wrote the book A Bell for Adano. "As he turned to write the novel, Hersey borrowed General Patton, contrived a romantic interest for the major (provoking a lawsuit after the war) and added the story of replacing the town bell. Everything else is fictionalized journalism in the strictest sense" (Sanders, 304). A Bell for Adano, published in 1944, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. Many feel that Hersey effectively portrayed American idealism, Italian poverty, and the frequently direct link between comedy and tragedy in an exceptionally skilled manner.

Hersey’s next book, Hiroshima, first published as an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1946, began to open numerous American’s mind to the awareness of what type of full devastation war means in the nuclear age. As David Sander’s writes,

No one has ever condemned Hiroshima; a book still always referred to as "inspired journalism." In fact, no one seems to have found adequate words for praising it. It gave millions of American readers their first knowledge of the human suffering caused by the first atomic bomb; before it, they had known nothing about the explosion but statisticsand photographs of mushroom clouds. Albert Einstein is said to have ordered a thousand copies of the famous issue of the New Yorker to distribute among his fellow townsmen in Princeton. Bernard Baruch ordered another thousand. Very few books have ever been urged people so suddenly and so imperatively,…Hiroshima has been praised more often as a deed than as a book. In whatever Hersey would go on to write, he would be marked by the "earnestness of his intentions"—not a novelist’s earnest intentions, but as a prophet's" (303).

Nearly four years of study based on translations done by two assistants, led to the writing of the historical novel The Wall about the Warsaw, Germany ghetto. While touring the areas of German atrocities, Hersey had been amazed that there had been any survivors of the horrors that occurred in Warsaw. He decided he would write about the Warsaw ghetto families, its community members, and of the few survivors. After examining whatever type of information that could be found—piles of diaries, statistics, medical records, organizational records, and Warsaw ghetto songs—and having it all translated for him on tapes, Hersey realized he had to change his standard habits behind reporting. He was no longer felt it was adequate to merely tell the facts. He decided to create a participant in the historical events named Levinson who strove to leave an archive about life for a Jewish man trapped in Warsaw’s ghetto. "Thus, the novel took shape as "the Levinson archive," the jottings of a fictional hero who enters the story as a scholarly isolate and leaves as a child of a family of survivors…He wrote a novel that goes beyond recording its day to affirm that survival from the ghetto was an instance of a universal theme" (Sanders, 306).

The theme of contemporary history was not in all of John Hersey’s publications after The Wall in 1950. He presented a nonfiction account of an occurrence during the 1967 race riot in Detroit his book The Algiers Motel Incident, published in 1968. Many of Hersey’s later novels surrounded contemporary social and political issues that also included moral epilogues for his readers to contemplate. He skillfully interwove his moralistic aims and social criticisms with imaginative plots. For those who have the opinion that news reporters or journalists cannot become successful fiction writers and novelists, John Hersey’s lifetime of writing has proven them wrong.

 Personal History:

b. June 17, 1914, Tientsin, China

d. March 24, 1993, Key West, Florida, U.S.

married: Frances Ann Cannon, April 27, 1940 (divorced February, 1958), children: Martin, John, Ann, Baird married: Barbara Day Addams Kaufman, June 1, 1958, daughter Brook

Education: Yale University, B.A., 1936; attended Clare College, Cambridge, 1936-37

Politics: Democrat

 Educational Career:

1945-46: fellow, Berkeley College, Yale University

1950-65: master, Pierson College

1965-70: fellow, Yale University

1970-71: writer-in residence, American Academy in Rome

1971-76: lecturer, Yale University

1976----: professor, Yale University

1975: visiting professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Honorary Degrees:

1947: M.A., Yale University

1950: LL.D., Washington and Jefferson College; D.H. L., Dropsie College

1954: Litt.D., Wesleyan University

1972: Litt.D., Clarkston College of Technology

 

Writings:

Men in Bataan, 1942

Into the Valley, A Skirmish of the Marines, 1943

A Bell for Adano, 1944; Pulitzer Prize winner 1945

Hiroshima, 1946 The Algiers Motel Incident, 1968

The Wall, 1950

The Marmot Drive, 1953

A Single Pebble, 1956

The War Lover, 1959 Ralph Ellison (editor), 1974

The Child Buyer, 1960

Here to Stay: Studies of Human Tenacity, 1962

White Lotus, 1965

Too Far to Walk, 1966

Under the Eye of the Storm, 1967

Letter to the Alumni, 1970

The Conspiracy, 1972

The Writer’s Craft (editor), 1974

My Petition for More Space, 1974

The President, 1975

The Walnut Door, 1977

Aspects of the Presidency, 1980

The Call, 1985

Blues, 1987

Fling and Other Stories, 1990

Antonietta, 1991

Key West Tales, 1994

 

Hecksher, August. "Through a Classmate’s Eye." The Arts Archive. October 1993: 6. Online. Internet. 1 Dec. 2000, http://www.yale.edu/yam/YAMArchives/Archileswebsite/Arts/hersey.html

Sanders, David. "John Hersey: War Correspondent into Novelist." Contemporary Literary Criticism 97. (1967): 302-306.

                    "John Hersey." Something about the Author 25. 1982.