John Richard Hersey (June 17, 1914 - March 24, 1993) was an American writer and journalist. Born in Tientsin, China to missionaries Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey, his family returned to the United States when he was ten years old. Hersey attended the Hotchkiss School, before Yale and graduate study at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He obtained a summer job as a secretary for Sinclair Lewis in the summer of 1937, and, that fall, started work at Time. Two years later he was transferred to Time's Chungking bureau. During World War II he covered the fighting in both Europe (Sicily) and Asia (Battle of Guadalcanal), writing articles for Time, Life, and The New Yorker.
Hersey's most notable work was a story for The New Yorker, entitled "Hiroshima," about the effects of the atomic bomb dropped there on the 6th of August, in 1945. The article, which tells the story of six victims of the bombing, was later turned into a book. His article about the dullness of grammar school readers in a 1954 issue of Time was the inspiration for The Cat in the Hat. Hersey also wrote The Algiers Motel Incident, about racist killings by the police during the 12th Street Riot in Detroit, Michigan, in 1968, and A Bell for Adano , which won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1945. John Hersey died at home in Key West, Florida on March 24, 1993. He is survived by his wife Barbara, his five children, and six grandchildren.
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