John Hersey Author Pulitzer Prize Winner Hiroshima Autograph Signature on Letter

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Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (808) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US & many other countries, Item: 176299959259 John Hersey Author Pulitzer Prize Winner Hiroshima Autograph Signature on Letter.

John Hersey Author Pulitzer Prize Winner Hiroshima Autograph Signature on Letter with original mailing envelope with his name on it.

John Richard Hersey was an American writer and journalist. He is considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reportage. 



John Hersey, the novelist and journalist whose "A Bell for Adano" won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1945 and whose nonfiction work "Hiroshima" awakened Americans to the horrors of atomic warfare, died yesterday at his home in Key West, Fla. He was 78. The cause of death was cancer, said his family. In the course of his five decades as a writer, Mr. 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. Speaking Out on War and Writing In public appearances and in work on special committees, he never hesitated to speak out on such issues as the Vietnam War, which he strongly opposed; on problems in American education, and on issues central to the craft of writing, including censorship, government intimidation of writers, copyright protection and fair taxation for those who create the nation's literature. He was a tireless worker for both the Authors League of America and the Authors Guild. Mr. Hersey sent his latest manuscript to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, just six weeks ago, said Judith Jones, his editor at Knopf for the last 20 years. Entitled "Key West Tales," it consists of short stories, set in the past and present, about people and events in his hometown. The book is to be published in the winter of 1994, Ms. Jones said. From the beginning of his career, Mr. Hersey won praise for the directness of his style, his eye for detail and his ability to get to the heart of any situation. But most critics suggested that his past as a journalist somehow showed in his novels and that his fiction was not developed as deeply as it might have been. This kind of criticism was heard even after the publication of "A Bell for Adano," in 1944, Mr. Hersey's acclaimed novel about events that occurred in Licata, a small town in Sicily that was ravaged by World War II. The book used some experiences of Maj. Frank E. Toscani, the American Army officer who became Licata's military governor and learned from townspeople that their most pressing need was the return of their bell. The centerpiece of their community, the bell, had been taken down by the enemy and melted for the war effort against the Allies. Major Toscani became very much a part of the town's lore when he somehow succeeded in securing another bell from a Navy destroyer. Over Dinner, Settling a Suit In the book, which became a best seller, Licata became Adano and Major Toscani became Major Joppolo. Mr. Hersey had the fictional major have an affair with an Italian woman. Major Toscani promptly sued Mr. Hersey for libel, stating that the book seemed so true to so much of what happened that many people mistakenly thought that the amorous adventure was true, too. The lawsuit was finally settled amicably over dinner in New York at a restaurant named after the novel. The novel got excellent reviews, although Diana Trilling, who reviewed it for The Nation and who basically liked it, wrote that Mr. Hersey's ideas, "like his prose, have undergone a process of conscious falsifying and purposeful simplification." Even so, "A Bell for Adano" won a Pulitzer Prize. In 1945, it also became a successful motion picture, starring John Hodiak in the role of Major Joppolo. Taking On Hiroshima Editors’ Picks Roger Federer’s Gift to Tennis: A Shot That Players Love to Hit The Little Hedge Fund Taking Down Big Oil Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Reflect on 75 Years of Marriage Continue reading the main story Mr. 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, Harold Ross and William Shawn, instead decided to print it in full on Aug. 31, 1946, allowing it to consume nearly all the editorial space in the issue. The New York Times ran an editorial calling attention to the piece, and Lewis Gannett, writing in The New York Herald Tribune, called "Hiroshima" "the best reporting" of the war and Time magazine praised its restraint. Albert Einstein was said to have ordered a thousand copies for distribution and a great many newspapers clamored to serialize it. Mr. Hersey allowed this, provided that they made contributions to the American Red Cross, rather than pay him. The piece was developed into a book, published by Alfred A. Knopf. Similar praise came in 1950 with publication of "The Wall," Mr. 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 the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award. It was dramatized by Millard Lampell, produced at the Billy Rose Theater in New York in the early 1960's and filmed for television by CBS in 1982. Speaking Chinese Before English John Richard 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. John, who spent most of his first 10 years in China, spoke Chinese before he spoke English. His life was eventful: at one point, he took a two-year trip around the world with his mother. But in later years he said he could recall very little of his childhood and described it as "no more exciting than the average child's." In 1924, the family moved to Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., in Westchester County. After attending public schools there, John Hersey was enrolled in the private Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., which he attended from 1927 to his graduation in 1932. After that came Yale, from which he graduated in 1936, and then Clare College, Cambridge. By the time his college days were over, he was determined to become a journalist. Returning to the United States in May 1937, he learned that Sinclair Lewis needed a private secretary. Mr. Hersey thus became Mr. Lewis's summertime factotum, copying pages of a play that Lewis was writing about Communism. Mr. Hersey later recalled that he worked intensively with Lewis without ever realizing that his employer had a serious drinking problem. A Criticism of Time Magazine Later in 1937, he was hired by Time magazine. "Time seemed to me to be the liveliest enterprise of its type and I wanted more than anything to be connected with it," he later said. He talked the editors into hiring him by submitting to them an essay in which he told them what he thought was wrong with the magazine. In 1939, Time sent Mr. Hersey 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. John Chamberlin, reviewing it for The New York Times, said the book gave evidence that Mr. Hersey was "a new Hemingway." Moreover, Mr. Hersey was commended by the Secretary of the Navy for his role in helping to remove wounded men from Guadalcanal. During the years immediately after the war, as he developed his novelistic skills in such books as "The Marmot Drive" (1953), "A Single Pebble" (1956) and "The War Lover" (1959), Mr. Hersey also kept alive his interests in things that had nothing to do with his books. He joined a number of local and national educational organizations and became master of Pierson College at Yale University in 1965, holding the post for five years. Killing of 3 Men In the 1960's Mr. Hersey became an early opponent of American involvement in the Vietnam War, and in 1965 he was a sponsor of a March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam. He was no less concerned with racism in America and in 1968 wrote "The Algiers Motel Incident," which described the killing of three black men in a Detroit motel. Mr. Hersey became involved in a literary uproar in 1976 when an article he wrote for The Saturday Review was pulled by the magazine's editor, Norman Cousins. The article condemned the influence wielded by certain large corporations, and Mr. Cousins reportedly felt it was not upbeat enough. Mr. Hersey married Frances Ann Cannon in 1940. They were divorced in 1958 and Mr. Hersey married Barbara Day Addams Kaufman that year. He is survived by his wife; their daughter, Brook Hersey of Manhattan; three sons by his first marriage, Martin, of Eastampton, N.J., John Jr., of Millbrook, N.Y., and Baird, of Willow, N.Y.; another daughter, Ann Hersey of Cambridge, Mass.; a brother, Arthur, of Annapolis, Md., and six grandchildren. John Richard Hersey (June 17, 1914 – March 24, 1993) was an American writer and journalist. He is considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reportage.[2] Hersey's account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, was adjudged the finest piece of American journalism of the 20th century by a 36-member panel associated with New York University's journalism department.[3] Contents 1 Background 2 Career 2.1 Reporting from Hiroshima 2.2 Later books and college master's job 3 Death 4 Honors 5 Works 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links Background Hersey was born in Tientsin, China,[4] the son of Grace Baird and Roscoe Hersey, Protestant missionaries for the YMCA in Tientsin. Hersey learned to speak Chinese before he spoke English; Hersey's novel, The Call (1985), is based on the lives of his parents and several other missionaries of their generation.[5] John Hersey was a descendant of William Hersey (or Hercy, as the family name was then spelled) of Reading, Berkshire, England. William Hersey was one of the first settlers of Hingham, Massachusetts in 1635.[6] Hersey returned to the United States with his family when he was ten years old. He attended public school in Briarcliff Manor, New York, including Briarcliff High School for two years. At Briarcliff, he became his troop's first Eagle Scout.[7][8][9] Later he attended the Hotchkiss School, followed by Yale University, where he was a member of the Skull and Bones Society along with classmates Brendan Gill and Richard A. Moore.[10]:127 Hersey lettered in football at Yale, was coached by Ducky Pond, Greasy Neale and Gerald Ford and was a teammate of Yale's two Heisman Trophy winners, Larry Kelley and Clint Frank.[11] He subsequently was a graduate student at the University of Cambridge as a Mellon Fellow. Career After his time at Cambridge, Hersey got a summer job as private secretary and driver for author Sinclair Lewis during 1937; but he chafed at his duties, and that autumn he began work for Time,[12] for which he was hired after writing an essay on the magazine's dismal quality.[13] Two years later (1939) he was transferred to Time's Chongqing bureau. In 1940, William Saroyan lists him among "contributing editors" at Time in the play, Love's Old Sweet Song.[14] During World War II, Newsweekly correspondent Hersey covered the fighting in Europe and Asia. He wrote articles for Time and Life magazines. He accompanied Allied troops on their invasion of Sicily, survived four airplane crashes,[15] and was commended by the Secretary of the Navy for his role in helping evacuate wounded soldiers from Guadalcanal.[1] After the war, during the winter of 1945–46, Hersey was in Japan, reporting for The New Yorker on the reconstruction of the devastated country, when he found a document written by a Jesuit missionary who had survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The journalist visited the missionary, who introduced him to other survivors.[15] Reporting from Hiroshima Main article: Hiroshima (book) Hiroshima in ruins, October 1945, two months after the atomic bomb exploded At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. — Opening sentence, Hiroshima, John Hersey, 1946[13] Soon afterward John Hersey began discussions with William Shawn, an editor for The New Yorker, about a lengthy piece on the previous summer's bombing. Hersey proposed a story that would convey the cataclysmic narrative through individuals who survived. In May 1946, Hersey traveled to Japan, where he spent three weeks doing research and interviewing survivors. He returned to America during late June and began writing the stories of six Hiroshima survivors: a German Jesuit priest, a widowed seamstress, two doctors, a minister, and a young woman who worked in a factory.[16] The resulting piece was his most notable work, the 31,000-word article "Hiroshima", which was published in the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker. The story dealt with the atomic bomb dropped on that Japanese city on August 6, 1945, and its effects on the six survivors. The article occupied almost the entire issue of the magazine – something The New Yorker had never done before.[16][17] Later books and college master's job Hersey himself often decried the New Journalism, which in many ways he had helped create. He would have probably disagreed with a description of his article on the effects of the atomic bomb as New Journalism. Later, the ascetic Hersey came to feel that some elements of the New Journalism of the 1970s were not rigorous enough about fact and reporting. After publication of Hiroshima, Hersey noted that "the important 'flashes' and 'bulletins' are already forgotten by the time yesterday morning's paper is used to line the trash can. The things we remember are emotions and impressions and illusions and images and characters: the elements of fiction."[18] Shortly before writing Hiroshima, Hersey published his novel Of Men and War, an account of war stories seen through the eyes of soldiers rather than a war correspondent. One of the stories in Hersey's novel was inspired by President John F. Kennedy and the PT-109. Soon afterward, the former war correspondent began publishing mostly fiction. Hersey's war novel The Wall (1950) was presented as a rediscovered journal recording the genesis and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of the Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The book became a bestseller[19] and won the National Jewish Book Award in 1950,[20] the second year of that award's existence;[21] it also received the Sidney Hillman Foundation Journalism Award.[22] His article about the dullness of grammar school readers in a 1954 issue of Life magazine, "Why Do Students Bog Down on First R? A Local Committee Sheds Light on a National Problem: Reading" was the inspiration for Dr. Seuss's juvenile story The Cat in the Hat. Further criticisms of the school system came with his novel The Child Buyer (1960), a speculative fiction. Hersey also wrote The Algiers Motel Incident, about a racially motivated shooting by police during the 12th Street Riot in Detroit, Michigan, during July 1967. Hersey's first novel A Bell for Adano, about the Allied occupation of a Sicilian town during World War II, won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1945, and was adapted into the 1945 movie A Bell for Adano directed by Henry King, featuring John Hodiak and Gene Tierney. His 1956 short novel, A Single Pebble, is the tale of a young American engineer traveling up the Yangtze on a river junk during the 1920s and discovering that his romantic concepts of China bring disaster. His 1965 novel, White Lotus, is an exploration of the African American experience prior to civil rights as reflected in an alternate history in which white Americans are enslaved by the Chinese after losing "the Great War" to them. From 1965 to 1970, Hersey was master of Pierson College, one of twelve residential colleges at Yale University, where his outspoken activism and early opposition to the Vietnam War made him controversial with alumni but admired by many students.[23] After the trial of the Black Panthers in New Haven, Connecticut, Hersey wrote Letter to the Alumni (1970), in which the former Yale College master sympathetically addressed civil rights and anti-war activism – and attempted to explain them to sometimes aggravated alumni. Hersey also pursued an unusual sideline: he operated the college's small letterpress printing operation, which he sometimes used to publish broadsides – during 1969 printing an elaborate broadside of an Edmund Burke quote for Yale history professor and fellow residential college master Elting E. Morison. A Bell for Adano first edition cover (1944) For 18 years Hersey also taught two writing courses, in fiction and non-fiction, to undergraduates. Hersey taught his last class in fiction writing at Yale during 1984. In his individual sessions with undergraduates to discuss their work, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author was sometimes known to write his comments in the margin, and having discussed his suggestion with the student, to then take out his pencil and erase his comment. As Master of Pierson College, he subsequently hosted his old boss Henry Luce – with whom Hersey had become reconciled after their dispute years prior – when Luce spoke to the college's undergraduates. Time founder Luce was a notoriously dull public speaker, and his address to the Pierson undergraduates was no exception. After Luce's somnolent speech, the former publisher privately revealed to Hersey for the first time that he and his wife Clare Boothe Luce had taken LSD while supervised by a physician. Hersey later confessed he was relieved that Luce had saved that particular revelation for a more private audience. In 1969 Hersey donated the services of his bulldog 'Oliver' as mascot for the Yale football team. Making his debut during the autumn of 1969, Handsome Dan XI (the Yale bulldog's traditional name) had Hersey concerned about the dog's interest level. A football fan himself, Hersey had wondered aloud "whether Oliver would stay awake for two hours."[24] With a new mascot, the sometimes hapless Yale team finished the season with a 7–2 record. During 1985 John Hersey returned to Hiroshima, where he reported and wrote Hiroshima: The Aftermath, a follow-up to his original story. The New Yorker published Hersey's update in its July 15, 1985 issue, and the article was subsequently appended to a newly revised edition of the book. "What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory," wrote Hersey. "The memory of what happened at Hiroshima." John Hersey has been called a "compulsive plagiarist." For instance, he used complete paragraphs from the James Agee biography by Laurence Bergreen in his own New Yorker essay about Agee. Half of his book, Men on Bataan, came from work filed for Time by Melville Jacoby and his wife.[25] Death A longtime resident of Vineyard Haven, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts – chronicled in his 1987 work Blues – John Hersey died at his winter home in Key West, Florida, on March 24, 1993, at the compound he and his wife shared with his friend, writer Ralph Ellison. Ellison's novel Invisible Man was one of Hersey's favorite works, and he often urged students in his fiction-writing seminar to study Ellison's storytelling techniques and descriptive prose. Hersey's death was front-page news in the next day's New York Times.[26] The writer was buried near his home on Martha's Vineyard.[27] He was survived by his second wife, Barbara Day (the former wife of Hersey's colleague at The New Yorker, artist Charles Addams), Hersey's five children, one of whom is the composer and musician Baird Hersey, and six grandchildren. Barbara Hersey died on Martha's Vineyard 14 years later on August 16, 2007.[28] Honors On October 5, 2007, the United States Postal Service announced that it would honor five journalists of the 20th century with first-class rate postage stamps, to be issued on Tuesday, April 22, 2008: Martha Gellhorn, John Hersey, George Polk, Rubén Salazar, and Eric Sevareid. Postmaster General Jack Potter announced the stamp series at the Associated Press managing editors meeting in Washington, D.C. During 1968, John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, Illinois was named in his honor. Soon before Hersey's death, then Acting President of Yale Howard Lamar decided the university should honor its long-serving alumnus. The result was the annual John Hersey Lecture, the first of which was delivered March 22, 1993, by historian and Yale graduate David McCullough, who noted Hersey's contributions to Yale but reserved his strongest praise for the former magazine writer's prose. Hersey had "portrayed our time," McCullough observed, "with a breadth and artistry matched by very few. He has given us the century in a great shelf of brilliant work, and we are all his beneficiaries."[29] The John Hersey Prize at Yale was endowed during 1985 by students of the author and former Pierson College master. The prize is awarded to "a senior or junior for a body of journalistic work reflecting the spirit and ideals of John Hersey: engagement with moral and social issues, responsible reportage and consciousness of craftsmanship." Winners of the John Hersey Prize include David M. Halbfinger (Yale Class of 1990) and Motoko Rich (Class of 1991), who both later had reporting careers for The New York Times, and journalist Jacob Weisberg (Class of 1985), who would become editor-in-chief of The Slate Group.[30] Among Hersey's earlier students at Yale was Michiko Kakutani, formerly the chief book critic of The New York Times, as well as film critic Gene Siskel. During his lifetime, Hersey served in many jobs associated with writing, journalism and education. He was the first non-academic named master of a Yale residential college. He was past president of the Authors League of America, and he was elected chancellor by the membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hersey was an honorary fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University. He was awarded honorary degrees by Yale University, the New School for Social Research, Syracuse University, Washington and Jefferson College, Wesleyan University, The College of William and Mary and others.[31] Works Hersey's books include: Men on Bataan, 1942 Into the Valley, 1943 A Bell for Adano, 1944 Hiroshima, 1946 The Wall, 1950 The Marmot Drive, 1953 A Single Pebble, 1956 The War Lover, 1959 The Child Buyer, 1960 Here to Stay, 1963 White Lotus, 1965 Too Far To Walk, 1966 Under the Eye of the Storm, 1967 The Algiers Motel Incident, 1968[32] Letter to the Alumni, 1970 The Conspiracy, 1972 My Petition for More Space, 1974 The Walnut Door, 1977 Aspects of the Presidency, 1980 The Call, 1985 Blues, 1987 Life Sketches, 1989 Fling and Other Stories, 1990 Antonietta, 1991 Key West Tales, 1994
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