On Aug. 31, 1946, when The New Yorker published John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” the 30,000-word article’s impact was instantaneous and global. Hersey had managed to get into occupied Japan and reach Hiroshima, then still a smoldering ruin after being decimated by a 10,000-pound uranium bomb on Aug. 6, 1945. Syndicated in newspapers around the world, “Hiroshima” was also released as a book almost immediately and translated into more than a dozen languages, including Spanish, Hebrew and Bengali. It sold out so quickly in Britain that the book’s publisher there had to rush a second printing of one million copies. “Hiroshima” has since sold millions more copies around the world and has never gone out of print in the United States.

Source: New York Times October 12, 2020 09:00 UTC