page_title: Hiroshima (book)
section_title: Literary reception
hierarchical_section_title: Hiroshima (book) / Background / Literary reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. View from the top of the Red Cross Hospital looking northwest. Frame buildings recently erected. 1945 Español: Efectos de la bomba atómica sobre la ciudad de Hiroshima. Français&#160;: Effets de la bombe atomique sur Hiroshima. Vue depuis le toit de l'hôpital de la Croix rouge vers le nord-ouest.
context_page_description: Hiroshima is a 1946 book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey. It tells the stories of six survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It is regarded as one of the earliest examples of the New Journalism, in which the story-telling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reporting.
  The work was originally published in The New Yorker, which had planned to run it over four issues but instead dedicated the entire edition of August 31, 1946, to a single article. Less than two months later, the article was printed as a book by Alfred A. Knopf. Never out of print, it has sold more than three million copies. "Its story became a part of our ceaseless thinking about world wars and nuclear holocaust," New Yorker essayist Roger Angell wrote in 1995.
context_section_description: Containing a detailed description of the bomb's effects, the article was a publishing sensation. In plain prose, Hersey described the horrifying aftermath of the atomic device: people with melted eyeballs, or people vaporized, leaving only their shadows etched onto walls. The New Yorker article Hiroshima was an immediate best seller and was sold out at newsstands within hours. Many requests for reprints were received by the magazine's offices. The ABC Radio Network preempted regular programming to broadcast readings of the complete text by well-known actors in four half-hour programs. Many radio stations abroad did likewise, including the BBC in Britain, where newsprint rationing that continued after the war's end prevented its publication; Hersey would not permit editing of the piece to cut its length. The Book of the Month Club rushed a copy of the article into book format, which it sent to members as a free selection, saying "We find it hard to conceive of anything being written that could be of more important  [sic] at this moment to the human race."
  Published a little more than a year after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the American public was shown a different interpretation of the Japanese from what had been previously described in the media. The Americans could let go of some of the guilt knowing that the Japanese did not blame them for this terrible act of war. After reading Hiroshima, a Manhattan Project scientist wrote that he wept as he remembered how he had celebrated the dropping of the atomic bomb. Scientists along with the American public felt shame and guilt at the suffering of the people of Hiroshima. As voiced by witnesses in Hiroshima, the people of Hiroshima did not blame the Americans for the infliction but instead their own government. Many Japanese believe that the dropping of the atomic bomb saved Japan and it was widely thought that the Japanese Government would have destroyed the entire country before losing the war.
  The 31,000 word article was published later the same year by Alfred A. Knopf as a book. Hersey's work is often cited as one of the earliest examples of New Journalism in its melding of elements of non-fiction reportage with the pace and devices of the novel. Hersey's plain prose was praised by critics as a model of understated narrative. Hersey rarely gave interviews and abhorred going on anything resembling book tours, as his longtime editor Judith Jones recalled. "If ever there was a subject calculated to make a writer overwrought and a piece overwritten, it was the bombing of Hiroshima", wrote Hendrik Hertzberg; "yet Hersey's reporting was so meticulous, his sentences and paragraphs were so clear, calm and restrained, that the horror of the story he had to tell came through all the more chillingly."
  The author said he adopted the plain style to suit the story he strove to tell. "The flat style was deliberate", Hersey said 40 years later, "and I still think I was right to adopt it. A high literary manner, or a show of passion, would have brought me into the story as a mediator. I wanted to avoid such mediation, so the reader's experience would be as direct as possible."
  The founder of The New Yorker Harold Ross told his friend, author Irwin Shaw: "I don't think I've ever got as much satisfaction out of anything else in my life." But The New Yorker's publication of Hersey's article caused trouble with respect to Hersey's relationship with Henry Luce, the co-founder of Time-Life and Hersey's first mentor, who felt Hersey should have reported the event for one of Luce's magazines instead. Despite Luce's misgivings about Hersey's choice of The New Yorker to print the Hiroshima story, the magazine's format and style allowed the author much more freedom in reporting and writing. The Luce publications – Time, Life and Fortune – had nothing similar. Moreover, The New Yorker went to unprecedented lengths to keep the Hersey story secret. The weekly magazine's top editors observed complete secrecy about the printing of the article. While editors Harold Ross and William Shawn spe
caption: Hiroshima in ruins, October 1945, two months after the atomic bomb exploded.
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