Mr. Straight Arrow
The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A monumental reevaluation of the career of John Hersey, the author of Hiroshima
Few are the books with as immediate an impact and as enduring a legacy as John Hersey’s Hiroshima. First published as an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1946, it was serialized 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 audience?
In Mr. Straight Arrow, Jeremy Treglown answers that question and shows that Hiroshima was not an aberration but was emblematic of the author’s lifework. By the time of Hiroshima’s publication, Hersey was already a famed war writer and had won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He continued to publish journalism of immediate and pressing moral concern; his reporting from the Freedom Summer and his exposés of the Detroit riots resonate all too loudly today. But his obsessive doubts over the value of his work never ceased. Mr. Straight Arrow is an intimate, exacting study of the achievements and contradictions of Hersey’s career, which reveals the powers of a writer tirelessly committed to truth and social change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic Treglown (Roald Dahl: A Biography) skillfully examines the career of novelist and journalist John Hersey, finding a man whose literary gifts made his work timeless. This account tells of Hersey's birth to missionary parents in China and his formative years there before he moved back to the U.S. for his schooling, attending Yale and then embarking on his journalism career. He settled at the New Yorker, which made his name for good when it devoted the entire Aug. 31, 1946, issue to Hersey's nonfiction account Hiroshima. Treglown's focus is squarely on Hersey's work, not his personal life, but the portrait that emerges of a deeply principled artist is all the clearer for it. Even when writing novels, Hersey's "first impulse was to establish positively, painstakingly, and sympathetically what the facts of a case were," Treglown asserts. Moreover, whether his subjects were the Hiroshima bombing's victims or President Truman, Hersey "was someone whose decency was recognized by other decent people," allowing him to make the deep connections his work required. This scrupulously researched study not only reveals much about the man behind the work, it reminds media-wary readers of what constitutes good journalism and why it is essential.
