John Hersey was a foreign correspondent with a conscience. His 1946 account of Hiroshima after the bomb, originally published in The New Yorker, was poetic in its alertness to language, setting and characters. He was devoted to facts but, in arranging them with the storytelling devices of fiction, anticipated the New Journalism of the 1960s. He deserves to be better remembered. British biographer Jeremy Treglown recalls that Hersey accomplished several firsts, including the first novel on the Holocaust, The Wall (1950), and remained a calm voice of journalistic reason through his death in 1993. Hersey was an insider willing to look outside, a scion of the old East Coast establishment who believed a life without moral purpose wasn’t worth living.