John Hersey

Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey interviewed survivors of Hiroshima's bomb while the ashes were still warm. Hersey describes the lives of six people — a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a surgeon, and a German Catholic priest — shortly before and for about a year after the bombing. While describing the ordeals of these individuals, Hersey manages to convey the devastation and the suffering experienced by the people of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. A final chapter was added in 1985 that continues with the lives of these six people.