"A monumental revaluation of the career of John Hersey, the author of Hiroshima"-- "Few books have as immediate an impact and as enduring a legacy as John Hersey's Hiroshima. First published as an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1946, it was...
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"A monumental revaluation of the career of John Hersey, the author of Hiroshima"-- "Few books have as immediate an impact and as enduring a legacy as John Hersey's Hiroshima. First published as an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1946, it was serialized in newspapers the world over and has never gone out of print... By the time of Hiroshima's publication, Hersey was already a famed war writer and had won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He continued to publish journalism of immediate and pressing moral concern; his reporting from the Freedom Summer and his exposés of the Detroit riots resonate all too loudly today. But his obsessive doubts over the value of his work never ceased. Mr. Straight Arrow is an intimate, exacting study of the achievements and contradictions of Hersey's career, which reveals the powers of a writer tirelessly committed to truth and social change."--Dust jacket flap
Preface: civic virtue and our present difficulties -- A sentimental journey -- To be a Hersey -- On top of the hill -- Getting hurt getting through -- Tu Lu-Men, Chu Chi-Erh, and Shi-Taling -- Pyramid, sun, and cube -- Listening to the dead -- Mr. straight arrow -- Those breakthroughs I yearn for -- The master -- Sweet land of liberty -- A kind of daylight in the mind
