John Hersey

John Hersey was born to a family of missionaries living in China; he grew up speaking Chinese before he spoke English. When he was ten, he moved to New York to attend school, and he later went to the elite Hotchkiss boarding school, followed by Yale. Hersey attended graduate school at Cambridge, and then began writing for Time magazine. He was a war correspondent during World War Two, and he wrote for some of America’s most popular papers and magazines, including The New York Times and Life. Shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima, Hersey began writing a lengthy magazine article on the subject; it was later published in The New Yorker, and it became Hersey’s defining work. Following Hiroshima, Hersey penned many other novels and nonfiction books. During the 1960s, he was a residential college master at Yale, where he was noted for his support of radical student movements. Hersey continued writing prolifically in the final three years of his life, and he was almost universally respected—an elder statesman of American journalism.