Hiroshima

When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, killing 100,000 men women and children, a new era in human history opened. Written a mere year after the disaster, this work offers a heart rending account of six men and women who survived despite all the odds. Forty years later, John Hersey returned to Hiroshima to discover how the same six people had struggled to cope with catastrophe and with often crippling disease. His long new chapter, which also considers the dramatic proliferation of nuclear weaponry since the war, provides a devastating picture of the long term effects of one very small bomb.

Author Biography

John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914, and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Clare College, Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked for several years as a journalist. He published seventeen works of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize winning A Bell for Adano. Besides Hiroshima which was first published in 1946, he wrote six books of essays and reportage. He died in 1993.