The first stage had been all over before the doctors even knew they were dealing with a new sickness; it was the direct reaction to the bombardment of the body, at the moment when the bomb went off, by neutrons, beta particles, and gamma rays.

He subsequently was a graduate student at the University of Cambridge as a Mellon Fellow. The ABC Radio Network preempted regular programming to broadcast readings of the complete text by well-known actors in four half-hour programs. Later he attended the Hotchkiss School followed by Yale University where he was a member of Skull and Bones Society.

John Richard Hersey (June 17 1914 – March 24 1993) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and journalist considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism in which storytelling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reportage. Hersey's account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima Japan was adjudged the finest piece of journalism of the 20th century by a 36-member panel associated with New York University's journalism department.