Hiroshima - John Hersey 1946

Background on the book

It tells the stories of six survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It is regarded as one of the earliest examples of New Journalism, in which the story-telling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reporting.

The work was originally published in The New Yorker, which had planned to run it over four issues but instead dedicated the entire edition of August 31, 1946, to a single article.

Published a little more than a year after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the American public was shown a different interpretation of the Japanese from what had been previously described in the media. After reading Hiroshima, a Manhattan Project scientist wrote that he wept as he remembered how he had celebrated the dropping of the atomic bomb.