Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 25, 1993 TAG: 9303250220
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: From The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
PULITZER WINNER JOHN HERSEY DIES
John Hersey, the novelist and journalist whose "A Bell for Adano" won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and whose nonfiction work "Hiroshima" awakened Americans to the horrors of atomic warfare, died Wednesday in Key West, Fla.Hersey was 78. The cause was cancer, his family said.
In his five decades as a writer, Hersey emerged not only as a first-rate reporter but also as a storyteller who nurtured the idea that writers had to pursue a moral goal. He involved himself deeply in the issues of his day.
Hersey sent his latest manuscript to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, just six weeks ago. "Key West Tales" consists of short stories about people and events in his home town. The book is scheduled for publication in winter 1994.
"A Bell for Adano," Hersey's acclaimed novel about events that occurred in a small town in Sicily that was ravaged by World War II, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1945. It also was made into a movie.
Hersey's next big project was "Hiroshima," a major work of nonfiction that traces the lives of six people who survived the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945. It was written as a three-part series for The New Yorker, but the magazine's editors instead printed it in full on Aug. 31, 1946. The piece then was developed into a book.
"John Hersey's writing about the moral problems in World War II was of the highest quality," said author James Michener.
As a correspondent and novelist, Hersey believed strongly that fiction could be used to advantage in depicting real life.
"Fiction is a clarifying agent. It makes truth plausible," he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in 1949. ". . . Among all the means of communication now available, imaginative literature comes closer than any other to being able to give an impression of the truth."
In 1950 came publication of "The Wall," Hersey's novel about events in the Warsaw ghetto from November 1939, with the German occupation, to May 1943, when the last houses in the ghetto were razed. "The Wall" won the Daroff Memorial Fiction Award of the Jewish Book Council of America, and was dramatized and produced at the Billy Rose Theater in New York in the early 1960s and filmed for television by CBS in 1982.
Hersey was born on June 17, 1914, in Tientsin, China. His father, Roscoe, worked for the Young Men's Christian Association there; his mother, the former Grace Baird, was a missionary. The boy spoke Chinese before he spoke English.
Hersey graduated from Yale University and then Clare College, Cambridge. In 1937, he was hired by Time magazine, and two years later, he was sent to the Far East, where he covered the initial stages of World War II. His first book, "Men on Bataan," was produced in 1942, and the next year he wrote "Into the Valley," a novel about a skirmish on Guadalcanal.
Hersey became an early opponent of American involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1965 he was a sponsor of a March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam.
He was no less concerned with racism. In 1968 he wrote "The Algiers Motel Incident," which described the killing of three black men in a Detroit motel.