John Hersey

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John Hersey

• 1914 -1993

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Early Life

• Born 1914 in Tianjin
• Moved to US at age 10
• Yale 1936
• Cambridge - 1937
• Time Magazine 1937

• Chongqing 1939
• Guadalcanal 1942
• Italy 1943
• Moscow 1944-5

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As a writer

• Time, New Yorker, Life, The Atlantic Monthly
• Falling out with Luce
• A Bell for Adano (1944) novel
• The Wall (1950) 1st US novel on Holocaust
• Inspired Dr. Seuss Cat in the Hat

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Later Life

• Continued writing novels as well as accounts of
  major events
• Master of Pierson College at Yale 1965
• Lecturer and professor at Yale 1971-84

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Hiroshima
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I was astonished that in all the millions of
words being written about the bombhow and why
the decision was made, how the bomb came to be
built, whether it should have been dropped at
allwhat had actually happened in Hiroshima
itself...was being ignored.

• William Shawn
• Managing Editor, The New Yorker

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TO OUR READERS The New Yorker this week devotes
its entire editorial space to an article on the
almost complete obliteration of a city by one
atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of
that city. It does so in the conviction that few
of us have yet comprehended the all but
incredible destructive power of this weapon, and
that everyone might well take time to consider
the terrible implications of its use.- The
Editors.
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Six Subjects

• Miss Toshinki Sasaki
• Dr. Masakazu Fujii
• Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura
• Father William Kleinsorge
• Dr. Terufumi Sasaki
• Rev. Kiyoshi Tantimoto

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Voice

• Hersey as author/narrator
• Never speaks
• Never offers opinion
• Never gives analysis
• He is merely a scribe for those
• who were there.

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Scenes

• From every second or third house came the voices
  of people buried and abandoned, who invariably
  screamed, with formal politeness, Tasukete kure!
  Help, if you please! The priests recognized
  several ruins from which these cries came as
  homes of friends, but because of the fire it was
  too late to help. (28)
• At Sakai Bridge, which would take them across to
  the East Parade Ground, they saw that the whole
  community on the opposite side of the river was a
  sheet of fire they dared not cross (28)

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Images

• They encountered only one person, a woman, who
  said to them as they passed, My husband is in
  those ashes. (40)
• He met hundred and hundreds who were fleeing
  skin hung from their faces and hands. Others,
  because of pain, held their arms up as if
  carrying something. Some vomited as they walked.
  On some undressed bodies the burns made
  patternsof undershirts and the shapes of
  flowers they had on their kimonos. (29)

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Emotional / Mental Impact

• Under many houses, people screamed for help, but
  no one helped in general, survivors that day
  assisted only their relatives or immediate
  neighbors, for they could not comprehend or
  tolerate a wider circle of misery. (29)
• Tugged here and there in his stockinged feet,
  bewildered by the numbers, staggered by so much
  raw flesh, Dr. Sasaki lost all sense of
  profession and stopped working as a skillful
  surgeon and sympathetic man he became an
  automaton, mechanically wiping, daubing, winding,
  wiping, daubing, winding. (26)

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Dialogue

• Youve got to find him. He loved our baby so
  much. I want him to see her once more.
• Ill try. (41)
• Why is it night already? Why did our house fall
  down? What happened? (19)

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Numbers

• Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city,
  sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest
  were wounded. Of 1,780 nurses, 1,645 were dead or
  too badly hurt to work. (24)
• At least 10,000 of the wounded made their way to
  the best hospital in town, which was altogether
  unequal to such a trampling, since it had only
  600 beds, and they had all been occupied. (25)

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Simplicity

• A woman from next door ran up to him and shouted
  that her husband was buried under her house and
  the house was on fire Father Kleinsorge must
  come and save him.
• Father Kleinsorge, already growing apathetic and
  dazed in the presence of cumulative distress,
  said, We havent much time. (26-27)

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Reaction

• A debonair disdain for reader appetites
  cultivated over 21 years. Newsweek
• "The death and destruction not merely of people
  and cities but of the human conscience is clearly
  involved." NY Times
• An insipid falsification of the truth of atomic
  warfare. To have done the atom bomb justice, Mr.
  Hersey would have had to interview the dead.
  Mary McCarthy

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Reaction

• I don't think I've ever got as much satisfaction
  out of anything else in my life.
• - Harold Ross, founder The New Yorker

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Hibakusha
His memory like the worlds was getting spotty.
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