It has been twenty years since C. P. Snow called for reconciliation between the “two cultures” of science and the humanities. Today they seem further apart than ever. Can we find new ways to bridge the gap?
In his novel A Bell for Adano and in his Report on Hiroshima. JOHN HERSEY produced two of the most remarkable documents emerging from the war. Now in his novel The Wall, the March selection of the Book-of-the-Month (Jub, a powerful, compassionate study of the Warsaw ghetto, he makes his major bid as a creative novelist. A graduate of Yale who was born in China in 1911, he served as private secretary to Sinclair Lewis and then on the staff of Time. Inc., before embarking on his independent career as a writer.
A foreign correspondent who saw action in the Pacific and European theaters; the author of three war books, Men on Bataan, Into the Valley, and A Bell for Adano; JOHN HERSEY is as well known for his fiction as he is for his documented and appalling report on Hiroshima. In this essay, which will subsequently appear in The Writer’s Book, an anthology edited by Helen Hull and sponsored by the Authors Guild, he states the aim of a novelist who, like himself, wishes to write a story of contemporary history.