John Hersey (1914 – 1993)

Born in Tientsin, China to missionaries Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey, his family returned to the United States when he was ten years old. Hersey attended the Hotchkiss School, before Yale and graduate study at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He obtained a summer job as a secretary for Sinclair Lewis in the summer of 1937, and, that fall, started work at Time. Two years later he was transferred to Time's Chungking bureau. During World War II he covered the fighting in both Europe (Sicily) and Asia (Battle of Guadalcanal), writing articles for Time, Life, and The New Yorker.

Hersey's most notable work was a story for The New Yorker, entitled "A Bell for Adano, which won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1945.