John Hersey - Later Books and College Master's Job

Later Books and College Master's Job

Soon afterward the war correspondent turned mostly to fiction. After publication of Hiroshima, Hersey noted that "the important 'flashes' and 'bulletins' are already forgotten by the time yesterday morning's paper is used to line the trash can. The things we remember are emotions and impressions and illusions and images and characters: the elements of fiction." Shortly before writing Hiroshima, Hersey published his novel Of Men and War, an account of war stories seen through the eyes of soldiers rather than a war correspondent. One of the stories in Hersey's novel was inspired by President John F. Kennedy and the PT-109.

In 1950 Hersey's novel The Wall was published, an account presented as a rediscovered journal recording the genesis and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of the Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The book won the National Jewish Book Award in the second year of that award's existence; it also received the Sidney Hillman Foundation Journalism Award.

His article about the dullness of grammar school readers in a 1954 issue of Life magazine, "Why Do Students Bog Down on First R? A Local Committee Sheds Light on a National Problem: Reading" was the inspiration for The Cat in the Hat. Further criticisms of the school system came with "The Child Buyer", a speculative-fiction novel. Hersey also wrote The Algiers Motel Incident, about a racially-motivated shooting by police during the 12th Street Riot in Detroit, Michigan, in 1968. Hersey's first novel A Bell for Adano, which won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1945, was adapted into the 1945 film A Bell for Adano directed by Henry King starring John Hodiak and Gene Tierney. His 1956 short novel, A Single Pebble is the tale of a young American engineer going up the Yangtze on a river junk in the 1920s and discovering that his romantic concepts of China bring disaster.

From 1965–70, Hersey was Master of Pierson College, one of twelve residential colleges at Yale University, where his outspoken activism and early opposition to the Vietnam War made him controversial with alumni, but admired by students. Following the trial of the Black Panthers in New Haven, Hersey wrote Letter to the Alumni (1970), in which the former Yale College master sympathetically addressed the civil rights and anti-war movements – and attempted to explain them to sometimes-aggravated alumni.

The courtly Hersey also pursued an unusual sideline: he operated the college's small letterpress printing operation, which he sometimes used to turn out broadsides – in 1969 printing an elaborate broadside of an Edmund Burke quote for Yale history professor and fellow residential college master Elting E. Morison.

For 18 years Hersey also taught two writing courses, in fiction and non-fiction, to undergraduates. As Master of Pierson College, he subsequently hosted his old boss Henry Luce – with whom Hersey had reconnected after their falling-out years prior – when Luce spoke to the college's undergraduates. Following Luce's somnolent speech, the former publisher privately revealed to Hersey for the first time that he and his wife Clare Boothe Luce had experimented with LSD under supervision of a physician.

In 1969 Hersey donated the services of his bulldog 'Oliver' as mascot for the Yale football team. Making his debut in the fall of 1969, Handsome Dan XI (the Yale bulldog's traditional moniker) had Hersey concerned about the dog's interest level. A big football fan himself, Hersey had wondered aloud "whether Oliver would stay awake for two hours." With a new mascot at the helm, the sometimes hapless Yale team finished the season with a 7–2 record.

In 1985 John Hersey returned to Hiroshima, where he reported and wrote Hiroshima: The Aftermath, a follow-up to his original story. The New Yorker published Hersey's update in its July 15, 1985, issue, and the article was subsequently appended to a newly-revised edition of the book. "What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory", wrote Hersey. "The memory of what happened at Hiroshima."

John Hersey has been called a "compulsive plagiarist." For instance, he used complete paragraphs from the James Agee biography by Laurence Bergreen in his own New Yorker essay about Agee. Half of his book, Men on Bataan came from work filed for Time by Melville Jacoby and his wife.