is planet, was resting in the hands of a couple men in Northern Virginia and some guys over in Russia. The atomic bomb and the amazing power it held over us had a tremendous influence on American Culture, including a profound effect on American Literature. After the war, the first real piece of literature about the bombings came in 1946. The work Hiroshima, by Jon Hersey, from which the opening quote is taken, first appeared as a long article in the New Yorker, then shortly after in book form. The book is a non-fiction account of the bombing of Hiroshima and the immediate aftermath. It is told from the point-of-view of six hibakusha, or زsurvivorsس of the atomic blast. In four chapters Hersey traces how the these people survived the blast, and what they did in following weeks and months to pull their lives together Gioielli 3and save their families. The book takes on a tone of sympathy and of miraculous survival ذthat these people were lucky enough to survive the blast. He focuses not on the suffering of the victims but on their courage (Stone, 7). The following passage from the first chapter shows this:A hundred thousand people were killed by the bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of the counts many small items of chance or volitionذa step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the nextذthat spared him. And each that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything (4). Hersey was attempting to chronicle what had happened at Hiroshima, and to do so fairly. And in emphasizing the survival instead of the suffering he does not make his book anti-American or something that condemns the dropping of the bomb. He simply gives these peoples accounts of how they survived in a tone that is more journalistic than sensa...
