Mr. Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima

Few are the books with as immediate an impact and as enduring a legacy as John Herseys Hiroshima. First published as an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1946, it was serialised in newspapers the world over and has never gone out of print. By conveying plainly the experiences of six survivors of the 1945 atomic bombing and its aftermath, Hersey brought to light the magnitude of nuclear war. And in his adoption of novelistic techniques, he prefigured the conventions of New Journalism. But how did Hersey - who was not Japanese, not an eyewitness, not a scientist - come to be the first person to communicate the experience to a global