John Richard Hersey was a writer and journalist who was one of the first western journalists to cover the events in Hiroshima after the atom bomb explosion on 6th August 1945. He decided to write about the aftermath of the explosion and selected six survivors whose experiences he chronicled in an issue of the ‘New Yorker’. Later on he published the book as ‘Hiroshima’. As a journalist he was greatly respected for his writing style and is considered one of the earliest journalists to practice ‘New Journalism’—the usage of unconventional literary techniques in journalism. He was a big fan of the writer Ralph Waldo Ellison whom he admired for his storytelling techniques. Hersey began his journalistic career working for the ‘Time’. He covered fighting in Europe and Asia during the World War II. Some months after the Hiroshima bombing he traveled to Japan to report on the devastation caused to the country. There he met six survivors whom he interviewed for his report—his account of the aftermath of the bombing is said to be one of the finest pieces of American journalism of the 20th century. Based on his experiences as a war journalist, he wrote the novel ‘A Bell for Adano’ which won the Pulitzer Prize.
