Hersey John Richard 1914-1993

The prolific author Hersey John Richard was born on June 17th, 1914, in Tientsin, China. He spent his first ten years in China, and after graduating from Yale and Clare College, Cambridge, he became Sinclair Lewis’s secretary in 1937.

Later he started his career as a journalist. During World War II he wrote to The New York Times, and also to The New Yorker from China and Italy as a correspondent. Hersey covered the war in the South Pacific, the Mediterranean and Moscow.

He wrote 14 novels and many short stories, and he thematically wove into his fiction the events of World War II, particularly the Holocaust as well as social concerns like racial prejudice and inadequate education.

His works include A Bell for Adano (1944), which was awarded Pulitzer Prize, and The Wall (1960), which is about evens in the Warsaw ghetto from November 1939 to May 1943.

In 1946, Hiroshima, a book about the effects of the atomic bomb on the loves of six people, was widely acclaimed. Almost forty years later, Hersey returned to Japan to find out what the lives of those six people has been like.

Hersey wrote two maritime novels, Under the eye of the Storm (1967) examined the marriages and the loves of two married couples on a small sailing yacht during a magnificently portrayed hurricane on the coastal waters of Massachusetts and Rhode island.
Hersey John Richard 1914-1993