Austin Hopper

Ms. Albrecht
Advanced Composition
4/13/15

John Herseys Life Influence

The life of an author influences their text substantially. If they have a bad life,
they will end up with grievous literature. Many authors have lives that influence their text
in a good way, John Hersey is one of these authors.
John Hersey was born on June 17, 1914 in Tianjin, China. His fathers name was
Roscoe, and his mothers name was Grace Baird Hersey. His parents were American, yet
he was born in China. Roscoe and Grace were both Protestant missionaries that worked
with the Young Mens Christian Association (The Famous People). Hersey, being born
in China, learned Chinese before learning English. When Hersey was ten, his father
became ill with encephalitis. Encephalitis is an inflammation of the brain which causes
fevers, headaches, confusion and sometimes seizures. Encephalitis can be caused by a
bacterial or viral infection. Other symptoms of this illness are convulsions, tremors,
hallucinations, stroke, hemorrhaging, and memory problems. Due to his fathers illness,
he and his family left China and came back to settle in Briarcliff Manor, New York. After
returning to the U.S., Hersey received his primary education (The Famous People)
from Briarcliff High School and afterwards went on to the Hotchkiss School from 1927
to 1932.

Hersey went to Yale for his higher education and ended up graduating in 1936.
After graduating from Yale, he became a graduate student at the University of Cambridge
as a Mellon Fellow (The Famous People). His first job was a secretary for the author
Sinclair Lewis in 1937. He soon found that this job was boring, so he quit. At both Yale
and Cambridge, he worked multiple different jobs, such as a waiter, a lifeguard, a
librarian, and a tutor. Hersey then wrote an essay about the poor quality of Time
Magazine and they gave him a job. Then John published Men on Bataan in 1942 and Into
the Valley in 1943, his first and second books respectively. The next year, Hersey wrote
his most famous novel, A Bell for Adano, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. During the
winter after World War II, The New Yorker sent him to Japan to cover the reconstruction
of the country devastated by the atomic bombing (The Famous People). In 1945 and
1946, Hersey found himself in Japan covering the postwar reconstruction for The New
Yorker when he discovered a document written by a Jesuit missionary who had survived
the atom bomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima. Hersey tracked down the priest,
who introduced him to many more survivors. Hersey chose six of them to write about for
the magazine, and their stories were included in a single issue in 1946. They were later
serialized in newspapers across the country before being published as the book,
Hiroshima. The dilemma is how can a man so love to make war and kill, but also learn a
natural reverence for life? Admiration for a mans will to survive instead of a love of
killing is what finally comes through in Hiroshima (CliffsNotes).
From Hiroshima:
Dr. Sasaki and his colleagues at the Red Cross Hospital watched the
unprecedented disease unfold and at last evolved a theory about its nature.

It had, they decided, three stages. The first stage had been all over before
the doctors even knew they were dealing with a new sickness; it was the
direct reaction to the bombardment of the body, at the moment when the
bomb went off, by neutrons, beta particles, and gamma rays. The
apparently uninjured people who had died so mysteriously in the first few
hours or days had succumbed in this first stage. It killed ninety-five per
cent of the people within a half-mile of the center, and many thousands
who were farther away. The doctors realized in retrospect that even though
most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had
absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body
cells caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls. Many
people who did not die right away came down with nausea, headache,
diarrhea, malaise, and fever, which lasted several days. Doctors could not
be certain whether some of these symptoms were the result of radiation or
nervous shock. The second stage set in ten or fifteen days after the
bombing. Its first symptom was falling hair. Diarrhea and fever, which in
some cases went as high as 106, came next. Twenty-five to thirty days
after the explosion, blood disorders appeared: gums bled, the white-bloodcell count dropped sharply, and petechiae [eruptions] appeared on the skin
and mucous membranes. The drop in the number of white blood
corpuscles reduced the patient's capacity to resist infection, so open
wounds were unusually slow in healing and many of the sick developed
sore throats and mouths. The two key symptoms, on which the doctors

came to base their prognosis, were fever and the lowered white-corpuscle
count. If fever remained steady and high, the patient's chances for survival
were poor. The white count almost always dropped below four thousand; a
patient whose count fell below one thousand had little hope of living.
Toward the end of the second stage, if the patient survived, anemia, or a
drop in the red blood count, also set in. The third stage was the reaction
that came when the body struggled to compensate for its illswhen, for
instance, the white count not only returned to normal but increased to
much higher than normal levels. In this stage, many patients died of
complications, such as infections in the chest cavity. Most burns healed
with deep layers of pink, rubbery scar tissue, known as keloid tumors. The
duration of the disease varied, depending on the patient's constitution and
the amount of radiation he had received. Some victims recovered in a
week; with others the disease dragged on for months (Hersey)
This quote is influenced by Herseys fathers illness. This is how Herseys life influences
his literature. John Hersey married two women during his life. In 1940, he married
Frances Ann Cannon, who was the daughter of a cotton goods manufacturer in
Charlotte, North Carolina (CliffsNotes). They had three children together: Martin
Cannon, John Richard, Jr., and Baird (CliffsNotes). However, this marriage ended in
divorce in 1958. John later married Barbara Day Addams Kaufman, who had his fourth
and last child, Brook.
In 1960, he published The Child Buyer which presents a case for individuality,
freedom of thought, integrity, faith in the young, and, above all, a better understanding of

human needs in a darkening world. From 1965 to 1970, he was Master at Pierson
College at Yale, and he spent the following year as Writer-in-Residence at the American
Academy in Rome. He is a past president of the Authors League of America and was
elected by the membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to be their
chancellor. John had turned his efforts to education, racism, and the disenchantment of
1960s students (CliffsNotes). Somewhere from 1965 to 1970, Hersey went back to Yale
and started teaching, mentoring, and writing books that personalized issues related to
fascism, racism, and the Holocaust (CliffsNotes). He then spent the next year at the
American Academy in Rome. Yet, he maintained a relationship with Yale as an adjunct
professor of English until his retirement in 1984 (CliffsNotes). Instead of calling his
books nonfiction novels which was the popular term at the time, he preferred to call
them novels of contemporary history.
Hersey was active in many organizations as a writer and was involved in the
public issues as a citizen. He joined the Authors League of America in 1948 and became
an active officer. Also, in 1953, he was the youngest writer that was ever asked to join the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. He became a member of the National Citizens
Committee for the Public Schools in 1954. This allowed him to pursue his interest in
writing and speaking about education. In 1965, as a part of the White House Arts
Festival, he did a public reading from Hiroshima (CliffsNotes).
The author D.W. Faulkner wrote about John, and he said this:
The first thing you noticed about him was his height. His frame was
slender, which accentuated his vertical line. He stood six and half feet, and
the birchlike shaft between his head and shoulders was often muffled by

turtlenecks or, on occasion, accentuated by a tie.Unlike many tall people,

who bend cranelike to accommodate the rest of the world, he remained
erect as a shore beacon, and his softspoken interest seemed to draw people
up to his level. There could be a donnish solemnity about his deep, direct
eyes, his prominent nose, and his towering forehead. He was quick to
laugh, tossing back white head in simple pleasure. Always curious, even
deferential, he was a consummate listener. Stories came to him that way
(Faulkner).
There are many different ways that John Herseys life influences his text. It could have
been where he was from, what happened in his early life, who actually influenced him,
and many more.

Works Cited

Hersey, John, Warren Chappell, and Edith Goodkind Rosenwald. Hiroshima. New York:
A.A. Knopf, 1946. Print.

Faulkner, D.W. "John Hersey." Sewanee Review 101.4 (1993): 636. Advanced Placement
Source. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

"John Hersey Biography." - Childhood, Life Achievements & Timeline. Web. 15 Apr.
2015. <http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/john-hersey-4890.php>.

"Hiroshima By John Hersey John Hersey Biography." John Hersey Biography. Web. 15
Apr. 2015. <http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/h/hiroshima/john-herseybiography>.