John Hersey's Hiroshima first appeared as a magazine article in The New Yorker. This was the first time the entire editorial content of that magazine had been devoted to a single article, showing how important the work was considered at the time (Toland 3). The book was published a few months later. It is an example of war reporting in depth, and it provided the public with the first full account of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, only a year or so after the event. In this book, Hersey focuses on six people who survived the bomb. Their stories and reactions to what they saw enable the writer to expand beyond the six to tell the story of the city as a whole and to place the reader on the spot when the bomb was dropped and in the aftermath of that event.
The book is reportage, but it cannot help but depict the horror of the event and to comment however indirectly on the ability human beings have to inflict terrible pain on one another. Hersey does not comment on the rightness or wrongness of the dropping of the bomb or on whether it shortened the war or was even necessary to win the war. These are issues raised much later. What Hersey does in this book is tell what happened in a direct fashion, through the eyes of people who were there and who could never have imagined the enormity of what was to happen on that day.
The method of the book is apparent from the first paragraph, which matter-of-factly presents the beginning of the story of the six people to be profiled. Hersey avoids emotional responses and presents the facts, and this is a good thing given the horror of that day, for an emotional appeal would be excessive because of the strong emotional response that the reader has to this material as it stands. He is precise from the first, noting that the bomb was dropped at exactly 15 minutes past eight in the morning on August 5, 1945.
The importance of the day's events to these six people is pre...