"Only a true novelist could breathe warmth, compassion, humor, into what a historian would necessarily have pictured as a stark, hopeless, tragic series of events. Only a sensitive novelist could compel us to embark upon such a fearful adventure as this and remain until the end." -- The New York Times "A searching, heroic story." -- The Atlantic

John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Beginning in 1947 he devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and was president of the Authors League of America and Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993."