Literary Birthday – 17 June – John Hersey

John Hersey was born on 17 June 1914 and died on 24 March 1993.

John Hersey Quotes

1. Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
2. It’s a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defence.
3. Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.
4. A writer is bound to have varying degrees of success, and I think that that is partly an issue of how central the burden of the story is to the author’s psyche.
5. Mankind must destroy anti-humanity before it becomes extinct itself.
6. To be a writer is to sit down at one’s desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone – just plain going at it, in pain and delight.
7. Events are less important than our responses to them.
8. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over….
9. The final test of a work of art is not whether it has beauty, but whether it has power.
10. When the writing is really working, I think there is something like dreaming going on. I don’t know how to draw the line between the conscious management of what you’re doing and this state. . . . I would say that it’s related to daydreaming. When I feel really engaged with a passage, I become so lost in it that I’m unaware of my real surroundings, totally involved in the pictures and sounds that that passage evokes.

John Hersey was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and journalist. He is considered one of the earliest practitioners of New Journalism, in which storytelling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction. He is the author of Hiroshima. He was past president of the Authors League of America, and he was elected chancellor by the membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hersey was an honorary fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He was awarded honorary degrees by Yale University, among many others.

Source for image: photographed by Carl Van Vechten, Public Domain

by Amanda Patterson
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