Question: John Hersey and Thornton Wilder had the skills to play basketball or write/novel?

Context articles: The Call (novel)
The Eighth Day (novel)
Antonietta (novel)
Charlotte Wilder
John Hersey High School
The Merchant of Yonkers
John Hersey
A Bell for Adano
Thornton Wilder
Janet Wilder Dakin

The Call is a novel published in 1985 by the American writer John Hersey.
 The novel, which is in the form of a fictionalized biography with letters and excerpts from Treadup's journal, presents the experience of David Treadup, an American Protestant missionary in China during the first half of the twentieth century.
 As the novel progresses, and China undergoes Japanese invasion and communist revolution, Treadup reconsiders whether his efforts to help China were useful and questions the usefulness of the Christian mission.
 Hersey based Treadup on a composite of six historical China missionaries, including his own father.
 Other historical figures appear, sometimes under their own names.
The Eighth Day is a 1967 novel by Thornton Wilder.
 Set in a mining town in southern Illinois, the plot revolves around John Barrington Ashley, who is accused of murdering his neighbor Breckenridge Lansing.
 The novel was written over the course of twenty months while Wilder was living alone in Douglas, Arizona.
 "The Eighth Day" was the 1968 winner of the National Book Award.
Antonietta is a novel written by American Pulitzer-Prize winning author John Hersey.
 Published in 1991, the novel traces the history of the titular violin, a fictitious creation of Antonio Stradivari, recounting its usage under multiple owners interspersed with what Hersey describes as "intermezzi", interludes of fact.
 Hersey's 25th novel, it was the last he released before his death.
Charlotte Wilder (1898–1980) was an American poet and the eldest sister of author Thornton Wilder, Isabel Wilder, Janet Wilder Dakin, and Amos Wilder.
John Hersey High School (also referred to as Hersey or JHHS) is a four-year public high school located in Arlington Heights, Illinois, a northwest suburb of Chicago, Illinois in the United States, it has its students from Arlington Heights and also takes some students from Prospect Heights, Mount Prospect and a small part of Des Plaines.
 Named after writer John Hersey, it is part of Township High School District 214, which also includes Buffalo Grove High School, Elk Grove High School, Prospect High School, Rolling Meadows High School, and Wheeling High School.
The Merchant of Yonkers is a play by Thornton Wilder.
 The play had its origins in an 1835 one-act farce by the English dramatist John Oxenford.
 Oxenford's work, "A Day Well Spent", was later extended into a full-length play entitled "Einen Jux will er sich machen" ("He Will Go on a Spree" or "He'll Have Himself a Good Time") by Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy in 1842.
 Wilder adapted Nestroy's version into an Americanized comedy entitled "The Merchant of Yonkers", which revolves around Horace Vandergelder, a wealthy Yonkers, New York businessman in the market for a wife.
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.
 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.
A Bell for Adano (1945) is a film directed by Henry King and starring John Hodiak and Gene Tierney.
 It was adapted from the novel of the same title by John Hersey, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1945.
 In his review of the film for "The New York Times", Bosley Crowther wrote, "... this easily vulnerable picture, which came to the Music Hall yesterday, is almost a perfect picturization of Mr. Hersey's book."
Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist.
 He won three Pulitzer Prizes—for the novel "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" and for the two plays "Our Town" and "The Skin of Our Teeth" — and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel "The Eighth Day".
Janet Wilder Dakin (June 3, 1910 - October 7, 1994), was a philanthropist, zoologist and a younger sister of author Thornton Wilder and poet Charlotte Wilder.