In 1985, The New Yorker published another full-length Hersey piece on the aftermath of the bombing, which was later included in editions of Hiroshima. When Published: The first portion of the book first appeared as the entirety of the Augissue of The New Yorker, and it later appeared as a full-length book in November 1946.Where Written: New York City and the Solomon Islands (in the Pacific).When Written: The first chapters were written in the first half of 1946 Hersey later added additional chapters, including one written forty years after the bombing.The bombing of Hiroshima remains highly controversial, with some historians insisting that it was an appropriate way for America to save countless soldiers’ lives, and other historians claiming it was an appalling war crime intended to assert America’s new supremacy on the world stage. Later, Truman changed course and claimed that the bombing of Hiroshima was a morally justifiable response to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the event that sparked America’s involvement in World War Two. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, President Harry Truman claimed that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were “military bases”-an untrue, or, at the very least, intentionally misleading statement (as one journalist said, “If Hiroshima was a military base, then so is Seattle”). The bombings were followed almost immediately by the unconditional surrender of the Japanese state, effectively ending World War Two in the Pacific Theater with a victory for the Allies. The overarching historical event of Hiroshima is, of course, America’s decision to drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed by another on the city of Nagasaki. Hersey continued writing prolifically in the final three years of his life, and he was almost universally respected-an elder statesman of American journalism. During the 1960s, he was a residential college master at Yale, where he was noted for his support of radical student movements. Following Hiroshima, Hersey penned many other novels and nonfiction books. 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. 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. Hersey attended graduate school at Cambridge, and then began writing for Time magazine.

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. John Hersey was born to a family of missionaries living in China he grew up speaking Chinese before he spoke English.

Hiroshima Notes by Kenzaburō Ōe