SOURCE: "American Apocalypse: Notes on the Bomb and the Failure of Imagination," in The Forties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1969, pp. 141-54.

In the following excerpt, Widmer gives Hiroshima a mixed review.

The murderous glare of the American Hiroshima Bomb, the single most destructive moment of that part of the twentieth century Eurasian barbarism quaintly labeled World War II, casts a peculiar light on some literary as well as moral faiths. Surveying the writings linked to the atomic bomb must impress us with how dimly literature reflects and comprehends the actual. Even the obvious symbol of the mushroom-cloud rising above a hundred thousand dead humans (and another hundred thousand dying and crippled)—rather a better sign of the end than anything in Revelation—carries but small affective power. At best, the art of the word can only provide a paltry, and probably falsified, reality.

Many of the...