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  • The American Scholar

    The Writer at Ground Zero

    Mar 04, 2019 5 minutes
    Review by Phyllis Rose

    MR. STRAIGHT ARROW: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima

    BY JEREMY TREGLOWN

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $28

    THIS ADMIRABLE BOOK about an admirable man, while insisting it is not a biography, recounts enough of John Hersey’s life to explain some of his enduring concerns and the arc of his career. It belongs to that elegant, reticent, wholly non-sleazy, and sadly disappearing genre known as literary biography, and for anyone interested in how a writer’s life is really lived as opposed to its incidental moments of glamour, Jeremy Treglown’s account of Hersey’s career—its constraints and opportunities, the worries and satisfactions, and the nature of the actual work—is deeply satisfying.

    Hersey’s parents were missionaries working on behalf of the YMCA in China, where the boy lived until the age of 10, speaking Chinese before he

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