The Magazine That Ran One Story

On August 31, 1946, The New Yorker published John Hersey's "Hiroshima," a single article that took up the magazine's entire editorial space, an unprecedented move for a weekly built on short pieces, poetry, and cartoons. Hersey had spent three weeks in Japan that May interviewing six survivors of the atomic bombing the previous August, a German Jesuit priest, a widowed seamstress, two doctors, a Methodist minister, and a young female clerk, and wrote their stories in the plain, reportorial style he'd learned covering the war for Time and Life. Editor William Shawn had commissioned the piece after learning almost no American press had reported what the bomb actually did to the people under it. Newsstand copies sold out within hours, ABC Radio cleared its schedule to have actors read the entire text over four half-hour broadcasts, and the piece went on to sell more than three million copies as a book that has never gone out of print.