… there were at least half a dozen star nonfiction writers on the staff of The New Yorker whom I admired and whose articles I clipped and filed away as examples of journalism that was both literary and historically relevant.
One article that I saved was a reprint of a piece that had totally occupied the editorial space of The New Yorker issue of August 31, 1946. It was an article by John Hersey entitled “Hiroshima,” and it described the devastation of the first atomic bomb from the viewpoint of six people in Japan who had survived the blast a year earlier. Hersey conducted hundreds of interviews with these survivors and other people in Japan and then produced a work of art that re-created for me the horror of that moment (8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945) in human terms so riveting and transcending as to soar beyond what I could imagine while viewing the film clips of the poisonous cloud mushrooming on the horizon.
The New Yorker issue featuring Hersey’s article sold out hours after reaching the newsstands, and on four successive nights the American Broadcasting Company canceled its regular radio broadcasts so that “Hiroshima” could be read to its millions of listeners.
- Gay Talese in A Writer’s Life
I read two posts about Hersey’s Hiroshima in the last several hours: the first by Susan Orlean, the second by Caille Millner, whose words made me remember Talese’s memoir and how much he revered the art of Hersey’s journalism.
