John Hersey (1914–1993), novelist, short story and nonfiction writer, was born in China to missionary parents. He graduated from Yale and the University of Cambridge, England, where he studied English literature. After serving as a private secretary for novelist Sinclair Lewis, Hersey became a journalist for Time and Life magazines, for which he covered World War II in both the Asian and European theaters. His first two books, Men on Bataan (1942) and Into the Valley (1943), are examples of skillful war reporting. His novel A Bell for Adano (1944) won the Pulitzer Prize. Set in an Italian village occupied by American troops during World War II, it reveals both his faith in humanity and his fears for the future of democracies threatened by ambitious and egotistic leaders.

With Hiroshima (1946), Hersey created a new genre that combined journalism and literature. According to Hersey, "Fiction is a clarifying agent. It makes truth plausible. . . . [A]mong all the means of communication now available, imaginative literature comes closer than any other to being able to give an impression of the truth." In The Wall (1950), Hersey employed the device of a fictitious personal diary to tell the story of the murder of 500,000 Polish Jews in Warsaw during World War II. Much of Hersey's fictional output is also historical and political. The Conspiracy (1972) uses an incident in ancient Roman history to explore the contemporary problems of political corruption and individual freedom.