A Bell for Adano was published in 1944 and won Hersey the Pulitzer Prize on May 8, 1945. It is the story of a small, occupied village in Italy that is temporarily run by Major Victor Joppolo, the military governor and a man of Italian descent, who tries to teach democratic ideals to the villagers. Joppolo attempts to retrieve the town's missing bell, which had rung in the steeple for 700 years. Various town characters appear, and General Marvin, the antagonist of the story, thwarts Joppolo in his efforts. While some see Marvin as a thinly veiled George S. Patton, others interpret him as an example of the dangers of modern corporate society or the nation state, running operations with expediency at a cost to individual freedoms. Hersey developed his story after studying the work of a military governor for an article for Life. His novel is a hymn to the common man who steps up to a position where he can help people. An example of democracy in action, Hersey's story was turned into both a Broadway play and a motion picture. Then, from 1944 to 1945, he was on assignment in China and Japan for Life and the New Yorker.
In 1946, he published Hiroshima first in its entirety in the New Yorker on August 31, and later as a novel in October. Based on the explosion of the first nuclear bomb in 1945, the novel attempts to take the extraordinary and inexplicable event and show how it impacts ordinary human lives. It personalized the event so that Americans, as well as a worldwide audience, could begin to understand the repercussions of the bombing.
The 1950s saw four more books from Hersey, beginning with The Wall in 1950. Hersey had seen the German concentration camps in Estonia and the Warsaw ruins where 500,000 Jews had died. His book confronted the ability of man to deal with totalitarian governments and posed the question, "Can man be morally responsible for himself?" Again he personalized an event of unimaginable horror. In 1953, he published The Marmot Drive, a novel about New England that studied modern lives cut off from the traditions of the past. It received poor reviews. A Single Pebble, published in 1956, was about the journey of a young American engineer up the Yangtze River during the 1920s. It allowed Hersey to consider his relationship as a modern American with the Orient. In 1959, Hersey published The War Lover, continuing a theme of the paradox of those who love war and fight an enemy within.
The dilemma is how can a man so love to make war and kill but also learn a natural reverence for life? Admiration for a man's will to survive instead of a love of killing is what finally comes through in Hiroshima.
