John Hersey was born on June 17, 1914 in Tientsin, China to missionaries Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey. He lived in Tientsin until he was ten years old and then returned to the U. S. with his parents. Hersey attended the Hotchkiss School, before Yale and graduate study at Cambridge. He obtained a summer job as a secretary for Sinclair Lewis in the summer of 1937, and, that fall, started work at Time magazine. Two years later he was transferred to Time's Chungking bureau. During World War II he covered the fighting in both Europe (Sicily) and Asia (Guadalcanal), writing articles for Time, Life, and The New Yorker.

Hersey's most notable work was a story for The New Yorker, entitled "Hiroshima," about the effects of the atomic bomb dropped there in 1945.

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