John Hersey, Hiroshima. The New Yorker, 31 August 1946. “TO OUR READERS: The New Yorker this week [31 August 1946] devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use. The Editors.” Jon Michaud, Eighty-Five From the Archive: John Hersey. The New Yorker, 8 June 2010: “Perhaps the most notable feature of “Hiroshima” is Hersey’s precise and unadorned style, which simply records the facts and places the moral and interpretive onus on the reader.” Paris Review Interview with John Hersey, Summer-Fall 1986: “My choice was to be deliberately quiet in the piece, because I thought that if the horror could be presented as directly as possible, it would allow the reader to identify with the characters in a direct way.” John Hersey in a letter to historian Paul Boyer: “The flat style was deliberate, and I still think I was right to adopt it. A high literary manner, or a show of passion, would have brought me into the story as a mediator; I wanted to avoid such mediation, so the reader’s experience would be as direct as possible.”