John Hersey Books In Order

Novels

  1. A Bell for Adano (1944)
  2. Hiroshima (1946)
  3. The Child Buyer (1947)
  4. The Wall (1950)
  5. The Marmot Drive (1953)
  6. The War Lover (1959)
  7. White Lotus (1965)
  8. Too Far to Walk (1966)
  9. Under the Eye of the Storm (1967)
  10. The Conspiracy (1972)
  11. My Petition for More Space (1974)
  12. The Walnut Door (1977)
  13. A Single Pebble (1982)
  14. The Call (1985)
  15. Antonietta (1991)

Collections

  1. Fling and Other Stories (1990)
  2. Key West Tales (1993)

Non fiction

  1. Here to Stay (1962)
  2. The President (1975)
  3. Blues (1987)
  4. Life Sketches (1989)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

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John Hersey Books Overview

A Bell for Adano

An Italian American major in World War II wins the love and admiration of the local townspeople when he searches for a replacement for the 700 year old town bell that had been melted down for bullets by the fascists.

Hiroshima

Hiroshima is the story of six human beings who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. With what Bruce Bliven called ‘the simplicity of genius,’ John Hersey tells what these six a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest were doing at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city. Then he follows the course of their lives hour by hour, day by day. The New Yorker of August 31, 1946, devoted all its space to this story. The immediate repercussions were vast: newspapers here and abroad reprinted it; during evening half hours it was read over the network of the American Broadcasting Company; leading editorials were devoted to it in uncounted newspapers. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told. His account of what he discovered about them the variety of ways in which they responded to the past and went on with their lives is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.’At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down crosslegged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air raid defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town…

The Child Buyer

This is a story of an investigation into the activities of Mr. Wissey Jones, a stranger who comes to the town of Pequot on urgent defense business. His business is to buy for his corporation children of a certain sort, in this case a ten year old named Barry Rudd, a budding genius of potentially critical value. A hearing is held and questions are asked: exactly why does Mr. Jones’ company buy children, and will it succeed in buying Barry?

The Wall

This book was digitized and reprinted from the collections of the University of California Libraries. Together, the more than one hundred UC Libraries comprise the largest university research library in the world, with over thirty-five million volumes in their holdings. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found online in the HathiTrust Digital Library. HP’s patented BookPrep technology was used to clean artifacts resulting from use and digitization, improving your reading experience.

The War Lover

The War Lover is about Buzz Morrow, a pilot who glorifies war and his military duties. Hersey makes the point that wars exist precisely because there are men like Buzz who revel in them. At the same time, he gives us a detailed account of a Flying Fortress crew based in England during WW II. The language is rough and expressive, revealing the loyalties, humor, and camaraderie existing in this wartime atmosphere.

A Single Pebble

A young American engineer sent to China to inspect the unruly Yangtze River travels up through the river’s gorges searching for dam sites. Pulled on a junk hauled by forty odd trackers, he is carried, too, into the settled, ancient way of life of the people of the Yangtze until the interplay of his life with theirs comes to a dramatic climax.

Antonietta

A saga of a magnificent violin, Antonietta, named after a beautiful woman who was the inspiration of Antonio Stradivari’s later years. As Hersey brings Mozart, Berlioz, and Stravinsky to life, he offers us a marvelous celebration of the changing character and eternal art and power of music.

Key West Tales

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.

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