The reaction was unexpected and astonishing. Newsstands could not keep copies of the New Yorker on their shelves. Newspapers from Rhode Island to London asked for the serial rights to print the story. Albert Einstein ordered 1,000 copies. The Book-of-the-Month Club sent out free copies. The ABC broadcasting system read it aloud on hundreds of its stations. While some reviews were critical of the writing style, others praised the slim volume for its ability to take an event that most people had simply read about in the newspapers and put it into the context of individual lives. The human mind had trouble imagining statistics such as the hundreds of thousands of people who were immediately killed by the atomic bomb, but it could understand the effect of the event on the lives of the survivors in John Hersey's writing.
Hersey came by his topics and form through many years as a reporter. By the age of 31, he already had thousands of miles logged in as a writer from all the years spent covering the Far East and the war itself. He was used to reporting facts and sending back dispatches to periodicals in the United States. When he wrote A Bell for Adano the year before, he shaped it as a fictional story but loosely based the characters on people he really knew. There was no question of its fictional nature; even the bell of the title was a figment of Hersey's imagination. But Hiroshima was different. In Hiroshima, Hersey displayed his amazing talents as a listener. After hours and days and weeks of listening, he assembled a multitude of hand-written notes from his subjects. As they told him their stories from their own point of view, Hersey faithfully recorded their perceptions, just as a good journalist would do. He also thought about how he understood the facts of those days in August 1945, through the feelings and viewpoints of those he interviewed.
