Most Popular Books by John Hersey

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author John Hersey''s seminal work of narrative nonfiction which has defined the way we think about nuclear warfare. “One of the great classics of the war" (The New Republic) that tells what happened in Hiroshima during World War II through the memories of the survivors of the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city. "The perspective [Hiroshima] offers from the bomb’s actual victims is the mandatory counterpart to any Oppenheimer viewing." —GQ Magazine “Nothing can be said about this book that can equal what the book has to say. It speaks for itself, and in an unforgettable way, for humanity.” —The New York Times Hiroshima is the story of six human beings who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. John Hersey tells what these six -- a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest -- were doing at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city. Then he follows the course of their lives hour by hour, day by day. The New Yorker of August 31, 1946, devoted all its space to this story. The immediate repercussions were vast: newspapers here and abroad reprinted it; during evening half-hours it was read over the network of the American Broadcasting Company; leading editorials were devoted to it in uncounted newspapers. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told. His account of what he discovered about them -- the variety of ways in which they responded to the past and went on with their lives -- is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.

Riveting and compelling, The Wall tells the inspiring story of forty men and women who escape the dehumanizing horror of the Warsaw ghetto. John Hersey''s novel documents the Warsaw ghetto both as an emblem of Nazi persecution and as a personal confrontation with torture, starvation, humiliation, and cruelty -- a gripping and visceral story, impossible to put down.

From the bestselling author of Hiroshima, a searing account of police brutality, white racism, and black rage in 1960s Detroit. On the evening of July 25, 1967, on the third night of the 12th Street Riot, Detroit police raided the Algiers Motel. Acting on a report of gunfire, officers rounded up the occupants of the motel''s annex—several black men and two white women—and proceeded to beat them and repeatedly threaten to kill them. By the end of the night, three of the men were dead. Three police officers and a private security guard were tried for their deaths; none were convicted. In The Algiers Motel Incident, first published in 1968, Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Hersey strings together interviews, police reports, court testimony, and news stories to recount the terrible events of that night. The result is chaotic and sometimes confusing; facts remain elusive. But, Hersey concludes, the truth is clear: three young black men were murdered "for being, all in all, black young men and part of the black rage of the time." With a new foreword by award-winning author Danielle L. McGuire, The Algiers Motel Incident is a powerful indictment of racism and the US justice system.

This classic novel and winner of the Pulitzer Prize tells the story of an Italian-American major in World War II who wins the love and admiration of the local townspeople when he searches for a replacement for the 700-year-old town bell that had been melted down for bullets by the fascists. Although stituated during one of the most devastating experiences in human history, John Hersey''s story speaks with unflinching patriotism and humanity.

An American missionary in China, David Treadup, is the protagonist of John Hersey’s magnificent novel, a novel whose richness of character, color, and incident both explores the evangelical impulse in this country—the peculiarly American spirit of wanting to help others—and reflects the whole complex history of China from 1900 to the aftermath of World War II. The Callis the story of one man’s spiritual odyssey as he strives to reconcile his commitment to God with his love of the struggling mass of Chinese humanity, to whom he pledges his life. It is the story of an American family choosing to make a home for themselves in an alien world that is sometimes exhilarating, sometimes overwhelming, always surprising—and periodically inundated by history, famine, war, revolution. It is the story of a marriage of abiding partnership, of a wife at once strong and vulnerable, struggling to be close to a husband whose awesome challenge to somehow make the world a better place for the Chinese people will always claim him. Treadup’s large adventure opens out from rural upstate New York, where he is raised on a struggling, isolated farm, to the Syracuse campus where, caught up in evangelical fervor, he is struck by a blinding light (through the voice of a Scottish rugby player) and answers the Call, to vast and turbulent China, where he is sent by the Y.M.C.A. to save souls. There, in the face of this three-thousand-year-old civilization, the tall, gregarious, ambitious American becomes quickly aware of his own insufficiency. But Treadup’s astonishing resourcefulness (who would think that a gyroscope could sway multitudes?), and his ever-growing passion to penetrate to the heart of China to bring its yearning people into the twentieth century, fire his energies again and again over the years of triumphs and frustrations, of rekindled vision and lost hopes. John Hersey, himself the child of a missionary family in China, brings to this deeply human story a profound and intimate knowledge of the life it encompasses, giving us an extraordinary authenticity of place and feeling. It is his crowning achievement.

Dr. Tom Medlar’s sailboat, the Harmony, is his pride and joy, and the focus of more lavish and meticulous care than he affords to either his career or his marriage. But then one day Tom takes his wife, Audrey, and their friends, Flick and Dottie Hamden, out for a pleasure cruise and into the unexpected path of a hurricane. As the deadly storm rages around them, the fault lines in the friendships and marriages begin to crack, and John Hersey’s riveting adventure story rapidly becomes something deeper and more unsettling. Widely praised on its initial publication in 1967, Under the Eye of the Storm remains a masterpiece of psychological fiction from one of the most accomplished authors of the twentieth century.

Alternating a tale of the past that has become a part of Key West legend with a contemporary story that reflects the pulse of life there today, Hersey weaves in these stories a brilliant human tapestry of the place that means a great deal to him. From the author of A Bell For Adano and Hiroshima comes this final collections of stories.

A street in New Haven. A line of people, blocks long, more closely packed than the rush-hour subways of the good old times. Poynter has been on the line since before dawn, as are thousands of others, pressed together, waiting their turns at the window to present their individual petitions. His is for more space—a notion so preposterous that when it is discovered it shocks, reverberates down the line, almost triggering violent reactions. In front of Poynter, so tightly jammed against him that he can see no more than the side of her face, is a girl petitioning to change her job. And, locked together in this fearful proximity, they talk, explore their predicaments, and perhaps fall in love. My Petition for More Space chills by its glimpse of a world grown so crowded that dissent is an inconceivable crime and acquiescence the law of survival. Feelings of hope and fear, desire, anger, frustration erupt sporadically, sparked by the friction of numbers. Call it tonight’s disturbing dream or a coldly logical scenario of things to come, John Hersey’s taut novel stings the mind.

In Here to StayJohn Hersey tells of episodes in the past twenty years in which Man has courageously risen above desperate situations and shown his determination to survive despite the threats of the nuclear age. Mr. Hersey first tells the story of an old lady marooned on a rooftop amidst floods caused by a hurricane. He ends with his famous Hiroshima, the story of the survivors of the first atomic bombing, written from personal investigation, with horrifying detail and compassionate indignation. Between these two pieces we read of John Kennedy’s heroism in rescuing the crew of his PT boat, sunk by the Japanese, seventeen years before he became President; a Jew’s suffering in Auschwitz; a crippled G.I.’s difficulties in adjusting himself to civilian life; the rehabilitation of a soldier paralyzed with fright; the adventures of two Poles who survived persecution; and a most moving account of an escape from Hungary in 1956. All John Hersey’s books have had a serious purpose. A Bell for Adanodrew attention to Italy’s plight; The Wall studied the Polish Jews’ struggle against tyranny; The War Lover exposed the war mentality;The Child Buyershowed up the exploitation of talent. Here to Stayis a stirring reminder of our inherent ability to meet the challenge of extinction which now faces the world.

Writing at the height of his powers, John Hersey has created a taut, dazzling novel of suspense and revelation—in which we watch, mesmerized, the fateful convergence of two lives. A young woman, having fled from her suddenly unbearable “college kid” self—and from the place, even the lover, that were part of it—comes alone to a strange city, anxiously waiting for something new and important to begin…. A man—breezy, ponytailed, beautiful—stranded by the passing of the sixties whose excitements had nurtured and consumed him, now lavishes his whole self on loving craftsmanship, on the construction of simple, perfect wooden doors, on the mystery of locks, and on the artful offering of security (his locks and doors) to women who are alone…. The meeting of these two, and their love affair—its choreography masterminded by one, unsuspected by the other—are hypnotically told in a novel that illumines the fearful and the fear-makers in our decade.

Nero’s secret police believe they have come on the first hints of a plot against the emperor’s life. Once promising and gifted—friend of poets, pupil of the great Seneca—Nero has now bloodied himself and grown fat on power, and he has turned his back on the men of intellect who used to be his chosen circle. He has driven Seneca into retirement. He has proscribed the writings of Lucan, Rome’s foremost poet. Crass, mediocre men—the military and the secret police—now have his ear and favor. While he and his court give themselves to dreamlike pleasures and fetes, the obsessed secret police close in on (or do they foment, or imagine?) the conspiracy of the men of letters…

This collection—harvest of a lifetime of brilliant reportage and reflection—brings together the most memorable biographical pieces John Hersey has written over the past fifty years. His subjects range from Sinclair Lewis, for whom the twenty-three-year-old Hersey was secretary, and the young John F. Kennedy as he related to Hersey the dramatic story of PT 109, to Private John Daniel Ramey and his efforts to overcome illiteracy with the help of the U.S. Army, and Jessica Kelley, an elderly widow trapped in a buckling tenement as the 1955 Connecticut floods raged outside. Whether describing a brisk morning stroll with President Truman or hours spent fishing for blues with Lillian Hellman, recounting Benjamin Weintraub’s harrowing escape from a Nazi death camp or Varsell Pleas’s dangerous struggle for voting rights in the Mississippi of 1964, Hersey brings us face to face with some of the extraordinary events and people of the past half century. And it is with his profoundly curious and sympathetic mind and unsurpassed journalistic eloquence that he brings each startlingly to life. “The skill that won Hersey a Pulitzer Prize in 1945 is more than evident . . . an important collection of lives and their lessons.” —The New York Times Book Review “Any reader not already a fan of Hersey’s will be swayed by the richness of this collection. Hersey’s legion of admirers will merely be gratified and moved again and again. . . The cumulative force of these essays is amazing.” –Kirkus Reviews

In the immediate sense, this long, eventful and agonizingly suspenseful novel shows what fear, secret hidden fear, can do to even one of those seeming heroes, a war lover. In the longer view, however, this may come to be regarded as the great and ultimate anti-war novel of our time. The scene is an American bomber base in England sometime before D-Day. The characters are the crew of a Flying Fortress named The Body, particularly the pilot, Buzz Marrow, and the co-pilot, Boman, who tells the story of his worship of Marrow, and of how his hero succumbed, on their final crucial mission, to the fatal weakness with which he camouflaged his fear—his secret delight in annihilation. Boman also tells the story of the English girl he loved (and Mr. Hersey’s many admirers will note a new tenderness and passion in these scenes), and of her fateful intervention in Marrow’s collapse. Both narrative lines flow together and are superbly united in the sustained and powerful climax.

A young American engineer sent to China to inspect the unruly Yangtze River travels up through the river''s gorges searching for dam sites. Pulled on a junk hauled by forty-odd trackers, he is carried, too, into the settled, ancient way of life of the people of the Yangtze -- until the interplay of his life with theirs comes to a dramatic climax.

A saga of a magnificent violin, Antonietta, named after a beautiful woman who was the inspiration of Antonio Stradivari''s later years. As Hersey brings Mozart, Berlioz, and Stravinsky to life, he offers us a marvelous celebration of the changing character and eternal art and power of music.

Contains 2 parts: Harry S. Truman, first published in The New Yorker, 1950-1951; and Gerald R. Ford, which was originally published in 1975 under title: The President.