Books by John Hersey

"Hersey's book is based on months of personal investigation and contains evidence never before made public. He ransacked every available piece of documentation. Thus armed, he tried to work out a tentative scenario of events and, more important, used his data to build up what may be the truest picture yet of the white policeman's role in the ghettos . . . His collage of interviews, fact, and intuition . . . jells into a forceful dossier against racism in the U.S. system of justice."— R.A. Sokolov, NewsweekThirty years ago, three black men were killed and nine other people brutally beaten by, as John Hersey describes it in The Algiers Motel Incident, an "aggregate of Detroit police, Michigan State Troopers, National Guardsmen, and private guards who had been directed to the scene." Responding to a telephoned report of sniping, the police group invaded the Algiers Motel and interrogated ten black men and two white women, none of whom were armed, for an hour. By the time the interrogators left, three men had been shot to death and the others, including the women, beaten.

A saga of a magnificent violin, Antonietta, named after a beautiful woman who was the inspiration of Antonio Stradivari's later years. In a masterpiece of historical imagination, Hersey traces the instrument's progress and influence upon owners, musicians, and composers alike--giving us a marvelous celebration of the changing character and eternal art and power of music.

Presiding over the small Sicilian village of Adano during World War II, an Italian-American major wins the love and admiration of the natives when he searches for a replacement for the 700-year-old town bell that had been melted down for bullets by the Fascists. Although situated during one of the most devastating experiences in human history, John Hersey's story speaks with unflinching patriotism and humanity.

Told in the form of a fictional biography, this account of the life and vocation of David Treadup, a New York farm boy who becomes a missionary to China, portrays the history of China in this century.

During a series of hearings, Mr. Wissey Jones must reveal the shocking activities of his corporation which sells children.

Believing that Nero's life is being threatened, the secret police set out to investigate the conspiracy.

John Hersey gives us his first collection of short stories revealing his extraordinary gift of genres ranging from broad comedy to metaphysical adventure to gesture-perfect social portraiture.

The first published collection of short fiction from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and reporter.

A New edition of John Hersey's classic story of six people who lived through the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima in 1945--with an additional chapter in which the author, returning to Japan forty years later, tells us what has happened to each of these six survivors.

Re-creates the agony and glory of a jungle skirmish of the U.S. Marines.

Alternating a tale of the past that has become a part of Key West legend with a contemporary story that reflects the pulse of life there today, Hersey weaves in these stories a brilliant human tapestry of the place that means a great deal to him. From the author of A Bell For Adano and Hiroshima comes this final collections of stories.

The author presents a collection of his biographical sketches of memorable individuals both famous and obscure, from Sinclair Lewis and John F. Kennedy to the children of the Holocaust.

A pictorial account of the internment of thousands of Americans of Japanese descent during the Second World War. The first such camp, Manzanar, was photographed by Ansel Adams in 1943, and his photographs are reproduced here with commentary text by John Hersey.

A pictorial account of the internment of thousands of Americans of Japanese descent during the Second World War. The first such camp, Manzanar, was photographed by Ansel Adams in 1943, and his photographs are reproduced here with commentary text by John Hersey.

Retells the stories of PT-109, combat at Guadalcanal, and the crew of a crashed B-52 attempting to survive on a small raft in the Pacific.

Includes the work of nearly ninety writers, including Ernie Pyle, Martha Gellhorn, A.J. Liebling, and Edward R. Murrow, capturing the urgency of events as they happened.

In Main Street and Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis drew on his boyhood memories of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to reveal as no writer had done before the complacency and conformity of middle-class life in America. These remarkable novels combine brilliant satire with a lingering affection for the men and women who, as Lewis wrote of Babbitt, want "to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late". Main Street (1920), Lewis's first triumph, was a phenomenal event in American publishing and cultural history. Lewis's idealistic, imaginative heroine, Carol Kennicott, longs "to get (her) hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful", but when her doctor husband brings her to Gopher Prairie, she finds that the romance of the American frontier has dwindled to the drab reality of the American Middle West. Carol first struggles against and then flees the social tyrannies and cultural emptiness of Gopher Prairie, only to submit at last to the conventions of village life. The great romantic satire of its decade, Main Street is a wry, sad, funny account of a woman who attempts to challenge the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of her community. "I know of no American novel that more accurately presents the real America", wrote H. L. Mencken when Babbitt appeared in 1922. "As an old professor of Babbittry I welcome him as an almost perfect specimen. Every American city swarms with his brothers. He is America incarnate, exuberant and exquisite". In the character of George F. Babbitt, the boisterous, vulgar, worried, gadget-loving real estate man from Zenith, Lewis fashioned a new and enduring figure in American literature - the total conformist. Babbitt is a "joiner", whothinks and feels with the crowd. Lewis surrounds him with a gallery of familiar American types - small businessmen, Rotarians, Elks, boosters, supporters of evangelical Christianity. In bitingly satirical scenes of club lunches, after-dinner speeches, trade association conventions, fishing trips, and Sunday School committees, Lewis reproduces the noisy restlessness of American commercial culture. In 1930 Sinclair Lewis was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, largely for his achievement in Babbitt. These early novels not only define a crucial period in American history - from America's "coming of age" just before World War I to the dizzying boom of the twenties - they also continue to astonish us with essential truths about the country we live in today.

A young American engineer sent to China travels up the Yangtze River and is drawn into a dramatic climax of cultural interplay.

A compelling story of forty men and women who escape the dehumanizing horror of the Warsaw ghetto.

On the verge of a new life in New Haven, Elaine Quinlan becomes the unsuspecting and increasingly fearful object of the vague advances and designs of self-styled security salesman Eddie Macaboy.

An allegorical novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and reporter. In a world in which whites have been enslaved by Orientals, a young girl named White Lotus is captured in Arizona and transported to China. After being sold into slavery, she survives a vast Chinese civil war and is emancipated upon its conclusion. Later she abandons her life as a tenant farmer and moves to the white district of a large city in the North of China in search of a better life.