John Hersey

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John Hersey, recorded by Carl van Vechten (1958)

John Richard Hersey (born June 17, 1914 in Tientsin , China , † March 24, 1993 in Key West , Florida ) was an American writer and journalist .

Life

Hersey was born in China to the missionary couple Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey. His family returned to the United States when he was ten years old. Hersey attended Hotchkiss School , later Yale University, and graduated from Cambridge, Massachusetts . When he got a summer job as a secretary from Sinclair Lewis in the summer of 1937 , he began writing for Time magazine . Two years later, he was transferred to the Time office in Chongqing . During World War II , he wrote about battles in Europe ( Sicily ) and Asia ( Battle of Guadalcanal ) for Time , Life Magazine and The New Yorker .

From 1965 to 1984 Hersey taught fiction writing at Yale University . He campaigned against the Vietnam War and protested the prosecution of the Black Panther Party . In 1950 he was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1978 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Works

Herseys best-known work is the Hiroshima report on the effects of the atomic bomb on the city of the same name on August 6, 1945. Originally, The New Yorker wanted to print the text in sequels. When the manuscript was available, editor Harold Ross decided, for the first and only time in the history of the paper, to fill a complete edition with just this one piece in August 1946. The report on six surviving victims was subsequently published as a book. In 1985, forty years later, Hersey added another detailed chapter to the report for a new edition of the book, in which he described the further life of his protagonists up to the present. Two had since died, but not as a result of the radioactivity.

With the novel A Bell for Adano , for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 , Hersey had chosen a fictional form for the first time. After Hiroshima he stayed almost exclusively with novels and wrote about 20 other books. The exception was the book-length report The Algiers Motel Incident about racist killings by police during the 12th Street Riot in Detroit in 1967.

Books

  • Men on Bataan. 1942.
  • Into the Valley. 1943.
  • A Bell for Adano. 1944. German: A bell for Adano. translated by Rose Richter. Steinberg, Zurich 1945.
  • Hiroshima . 1946, German: Hiroshima. August 6, 1945, 8:15 am, factual report, translated by Justinian Frisch . EVA, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-434-50596-2 (reprint of the Zurich 1947 edition)
  • The Wall. Roman, 1950. German: The Wall. translated by Ernst Bucher u. Edwin Maria Landau. Diana, Baden-Baden / Stuttgart 1951; Europa-Verlag, Vienna 1982, ISBN 3-203-50771-4 (under the title: Der Wall. )
  • The Marmot Drive. 1953. German: The driven hunt. translated by George S. Martin. Humanitas, Constance 1957.
  • A single pebble. Novel. 1956. German: The pebble and a millennium. translated by Werner Jochens. Diana, Stuttgart / Konstanz 1958.
  • The War Lover. Novel. 1959. German: We are all damned. Diana, Stuttgart 1961.
  • The Child Buyer. 1960. German: The child buyer. A novel in the form of interrogation before the Senate Standing Committee. translated by Günther K. Leupold. Diana, Konstanz / Zurich 1963; Structure, Berlin 1968.
  • White lotus. 1965.
  • Too Far To Walk. 1966.
  • Under the Eye of the Storm. Novel. 1967. German: Orkan. translated by Ulla de Herrera. Construction, Berlin 1979; In the eye of the storm. Rowohlt-TB, Reinbek near Hamburg 1987, ISBN 3-499-12107-7 .
  • The Algiers Motel Incident. 1968. German: Incident in the motel . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1970.
  • Letter to the alumni. 1970.
  • The Conspiracy. 1972. German: The conspiracy of the poets . Secret reports from ancient Rome. Zsolnay, Vienna 1974.
  • My Petition for More Space. 1974.
  • The Walnut Door. 1977. German: The walnut door . Novel. Aufbau-Taschenbuchverlag, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-7466-0021-9 .
  • Aspects of the Presidency. 1980.
  • The call. 1985.
  • Hiroshima 1985 (extended new edition)
  • with Nyna Brael Polumbaum (ed.): Save life on earth / Salvar la vida en la tierra / Save life on earth. Exhibition catalog. Elefanten Press, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-88520-196-8 . (Texts in English, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese)
  • Blues. Knopf, New York, NY 1987, ISBN 0-394-55960-6 . (illustrated by James Baker)
  • Life Sketches. 1989.
  • Fling and Other Stories. 1990.
  • Antonietta. 1991. German: Antonietta . Droemer Knaur, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-426-19297-7 .
  • Key West Tales. Knopf, New York, NY 1993, ISBN 0-679-42992-1 .

Film adaptations

literature

Web links

Commons : John Hersey  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Universities: Anxiety Behind the Facade, in: Time , June 23, 1967.
  2. ↑ Joshua Bloom / Waldo Martin: Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London 2013, p. 262.
  3. ^ Members: John Hersey. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 3, 2019 .
  4. ↑ The Paris Review: John Hersey, The Art of Fiction No. 92 , Issue 100 (Summer / Autumn 1986)
  5. ↑ europaeische-verlagsanstalt.de ( Memento from June 21, 2014 in the web archive archive.today )
personal data
SURNAME Hersey, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hersey, John Richard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH June 17, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Tientsin , China
DATE OF DEATH March 24, 1993
Place of death Key West , Florida, USA