SOURCE: "John Hersey and the American Conscience: The Reception of Hiroshima," in Pacific Historical Review, Vol. XLIII, No. 1, February, 1974, pp. 24-49.

In the following essay, Yavenditti outlines the context of the public's response to the stories in Hiroshima.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki, three days later, has spawned a considerable literature by survivors, journalists, novelists, scholars, and official government sources. Several films on the development of the atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project), the decision to use it, and the ordeal of its victims have reached limited audiences in America and abroad. Yet of all the accounts of the atomic bombings, probably none has been more widely read and appreciated by Americans than John Hersey's Hiroshima. Commonly assigned in high school and college classes, Hersey's little book has provided a generation of students with their most moving—and often their only—representation of an...