The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Read Online Free PDF Page B

material.
    “Joe Is Home Now,” which ran in the July 3, 1943, issue of
Life
, is perhaps a little too melodramatic for a writer of Hersey’s skill; it reads like a movie treatment for a Hollywood postwar weepie such as
The Best Years of Our Lives
. But its formal innovation is important. For one thing, the bleak, gray tones of the story made it an uncharacteristic
Life
feature (by contrast, the same issue contains a jubilant photo essay called “
Life
Goes to an Aircraft-Carrier Party”). The reporting is invisible, concealed by an omniscient voice that moves from scene to scene and unspools Souczak’s anguished internal monologue. The discharged solider, who has lost an arm in the war, encounters indifference and hostility at every turn as he tries to get a job, attempts to reconnect with his girlfriend, and pull his life together.
    The father said: “How was it in this war, son?”
    Joe said: “I don’t know but it’s rougher than the last.”
    Joe’s younger brother Anthony said: “How many Germans you kill, Joe?”
    Joe said: “Nobody who is a soldier answers that, Tony. You don’t like to talk about it, mostly you don’t even know, the range is big.”
    Anthony went over and touched Joe’s empty left sleeve and said: “What happened, Joe?”
    For all intents and purposes, “Joe Is Home Now” is a work of fiction derived from fact. In a 1985 interview, Hersey articulated why he felt fiction to be a more powerful tool than journalism for revealing the truth behind tumultuous historical events: “The journalist is always the mediator between the material and the reader, and the reader is always conscious of the journalist interpreting and reporting events…. So, to me, fiction is the more challenging and desirable medium for dealing with the real world than journalism. But there are always things that ask for a direct account while the material is still too hot for fiction. In those cases I resort to reportage.”
    “Survival,” Hersey’s stirring 1943
New Yorker
piece that recounted Lieutenant John F. Kennedy’s harrowing tale of survival after his PT boatwas hit by a Japanese destroyer in the South Pacific, was reportage that became the springboard for Kennedy the politician; when Kennedy ran for the House of Representatives for the first time in 1946, his father, Joe, had a hundred thousand copies of the
Reader’s Digest
reprint distributed to voters throughout Boston. It’s a tale that’s almost too good to be true—Kennedy, the stalwart and fearless naval officer, saving the lives of his comrades by virtue of sheer determination and fortitude, relying on keen survival instincts and a bit of good fortune. The story was turned into a best-selling book called
PT 109
and was adapted into a Hollywood film as well, transforming Hersey’s profile in courage into American myth—an unintended and somewhat ironic turn of events for Hersey, whose war reportage tended to focus on the antiheroic.
    In late 1945 Hersey traveled to postwar China and Japan in search of stories for both
Life
and
The New Yorker
. Before embarking, he sat down with
The New Yorker’s
managing editor, William Shawn, who suggested that Hersey might want to write about the lives of the survivors of the atomic bombs the United States had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. Shawn believed that a report on the aftereffects of the most cataclysmic event in the history of warfare might alter readers’ perceptions of what had thus far been an abstraction: the mushroom clouds that had led to Japan’s surrender and America’s triumph. In all the thousands of words that had been written about the bomb, not one had actually considered the human factor, an oversight that Shawn couldn’t fathom and wanted to rectify.
    Hersey was drawn to the idea of documenting the impact of the bomb “on people rather than on buildings.” But he was unsure how to approach it—how to telescope an enormous tragedy down to human