SOURCE: "Appendix: Cultural Responses to Hiroshima," in Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1995, pp. 359-81.

[An American psychiatrist, nonfiction writer, and critic, Lifton received a National Book Award for Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1968). Mitchell is an American journalist and critic as well as the editor of Nuclear Times magazine. In the following excerpt, the critics discuss the American literary response to the atomic bombing of Japan.]

Television and cinema have slighted Hiroshima, but fiction has virtually ignored it. There is no major American novel about Hiroshima. Indeed, few American novels of any stature explore the consequences of using the atomic bomb. Only a handful of fiction writers have utilized Hiroshima or Los Alamos as a setting, or explored the emotions and attitudes of the scientists, the policy makers, or the airmen who dropped the bomb. The few novels that have approached...