John Hersey and the American Conscience: The Reception of "Hiroshima"

Abstract

1 See especially the following works and their notes and bibliographies: Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York, 1967); Frank W. Chinnock, Nagasaki: Forgotton Bomb (New York and Cleveland, 1969); Walter Smith Shoenberger, Dicision of Destiny (Athens, Ohio, 1969); Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam-The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation With Soviet Power (New York, 1965); Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, Decision to Drop the Bomb (New York, 1965); Herbert Feis, Atomic Bomb and the of World War II (Princeton, N. J., 1966). 2 Tale of Two Cities, prepared by the United States Army Signal Corps (1945); the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer motion picture, The Beginning or End (1947); a National Broadcasting Company documentary on the decision to drop the atomic bomb (1964-1965); and a documentary prepared by the Japanese, which was seized by American occupation authorities in 1945 and returned to the Japanese in 1967. Japanese television viewers saw an edited version of this documentary in 1968; a much briefer version of it appeared on American television in 1970. 3 John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York, 1946). Subsequent citations are from the Bantam Book edition, 1959.