Eighty years ago, in August 1946, The New Yorker did something it had never done before, or since. The entire issue of this magazine included just one essay, by a journalist and author John Hersey. The essay, titled, Hiroshima, was around 31,000 words and described in plain but piercing language the lives of six ordinary Japanese before, during and since the dropping of the atomic bomb a year before in August 1945. All 300,000 copies of the magazine were sold almost immediately. Knopf, which got the rights to publish it in a book form, soon after sold 250,000 copies in a week, which was a record sale at the time. An NBC presenter read the essay live on air from morning till the studio closed at night.

In the course of weeks and months since its publication, the essay's impact was felt around the world. BBC produced a full dramatised reading of the essay. The piece reached audiences across the shores in Europe and Japan, but more significantly it reached........

© The Express Tribune