In 1950 John Hersey's second novel, The Wall, established him as a fiction writer of some importance. Though his first novel, A Bell for Adano (1944), and a nonfiction account of atomic-bomb victims, Hiroshima (1946), had identified Hersey as both a popular storyteller and a literary journalist of the first order, the long novel about the Warsaw ghetto gained immediate appreciation as a dramatic venture, a "novel of contemporary history," as Hersey described this genre.

Born on 17 June 1914 to Presbyterian missionaries Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey in Tientsin, China, John Richard Hersey lived there until 1924, when the family returned to the United States. He and his two brothers were educated in public and private schools, and Hersey graduated from Yale with a combined major in history, arts, and letters in 1936. Hersey then studied eighteenth-century literature at Cambridge University, England, until 1937, when he worked for a summer as secretary to Sinclair Lewis...