John Hersey and the most acclaimed book of nonfiction in the twentieth century

If we weren’t reading The Color of Water this semester, we would be reading Hiroshima, the story of the atomic bombing of Japan. This book is often listed the most important work of journalism in the twentieth century.

Hiroshima is widely taught. I hope you have read it, but if you haven’t, find a copy. It is one of the those books where the writer lets the people he interviews speak, and where he stays out of the story. You see this kind of reticence in some of the stories we are reading, the Titanic account, for example.

A New Yorker writer has written an essay about Hersey, who was by all accounts a modest man who never reveled in his fame.

Hersey was on a Navy ship on his way to Japan to report the story when he fell ill and someone gave him books to read, one of which happened to be Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.” It was a novel that traced the stories of five people who are killed when a bridge collapses. “It struck my father that that would be a good vehicle for presenting the story of the people who were subjected to the atomic bomb,” Baird said. “He told me about getting the idea of using novelistic devices to structure his reporting. He wanted to put faces and names to the story. Prior to that, we had been at war with Japan, and everyone had this opinion of ‘the Japanese.’ He wanted to show their humanity in a way that people in this country could connect to—to convey the enormity of what had happened.”

The structure of “Hiroshima” was one of the things that resonated with readers. Its use of fictional devices, such as building to a suspenseful moment with one character and then switching to another, was radical at the time, and made it a precursor to the New Journalism of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Hersey himself said that the profundity of the nuclear attack, and his consequent need to try to convey the reality of it to readers, forced him outside of journalistic conventions. With journalism, Hersey once said, the reader is always conscious of “the person who’s writing it and explaining to you what’s taken place.” He said he wanted to have “the reader directly confronted by the characters,” so he tried to write the piece in such a way that, as he put it, “my mediation would, ideally, disappear.”