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John Hersey’s Hiroshima and its Enduring Legacy
Written in 1946 and updated in 1986, the story remains as relevant as ever.
The New Yorker magazine released John Hersey’s Hiroshima on August 31st, 1946. Originally intended to run over four issues, the editors deemed the work so important that they ran it as the entire edition that hit newsstands and mailboxes that day.
Later that year, due to overwhelming demand for reprints, the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house released it as a book, which to this day, has never gone out of print. While the original publication is available on The New Yorker’s website, it is also available at bookstores as a mass-market paperback for $8.95. Today’s book edition includes an additional chapter, in which the author documented a follow-up visit forty years later.
The book has sold over three million copies and continues its legacy as a harrowing, brutally accurate description of the horrors of war and the nuclear bomb. With the release of Christopher Nolan’s epic film Oppenheimer, and some world leaders threatening the use of nuclear weapons, Hiroshima should take a renewed place in the world’s consciousness.
