Hiroshima

Hersey’s account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, told through six survivors — two doctors, a widowed seamstress, a German Jesuit, a young clerk and a Methodist minister — from the minutes before the flash through the following year. It filled an entire issue of The New Yorker in August 1946 and was published as a book that autumn. Hersey keeps himself and every adjective out of it: the method is to follow six named people minute by minute and let the facts carry the weight.

Its effect on American public understanding of nuclear weapons was immediate and is usually treated as the single most consequential piece of magazine journalism of the century. It is also a founding document of narrative nonfiction as a form.

Context: The list’s shortest and most technically precise nonfiction entry, and the one that most clearly teaches a method rather than a subject — restraint as a rhetorical choice.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• John Hersey — the author, a war correspondent and Pulitzer-winning novelist.
• World War II — its final days, and the weapon that ended them.
• Language of Discourse — the book is a lesson in how withholding judgement produces it.
• Storytelling — six people as the structure for an event of that scale.
• War — described from underneath.