Hiroshima by HERSEY John - 1983

1983. Signed. HERSEY, John. Hiroshima. With a New Poem by Robert Penn Warren and Silk-Screens by Jacob Lawrence. New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1983. Quarto, original full black morocco, original black cloth slipcase. $2300.Limited edition of this “quietest and best” account of Hiroshima, number 868 of only 1500 copies signed by John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Jacob Lawrence, and illustrated with eight color serigraphs by Lawrence.“The quietest and the best of all the stories that have been written about the most spectacular explosion in the time of man” (New York Times Book Review). “John Hersey once described himself as a novelist of contemporary history… In 1946 he visited Hiroshima, interviewed survivors of the first atomic bomb attack, and published the New Yorker article which changed him profoundly. In Hiroshima… Hersey drew from the victims themselves the understanding of history that had eluded him as a war correspondent. The six Hiroshima residents told him how they had lived before the bomb struck, why they were not killed, and precisely how illness, exhaustion, and personal sorrow had qualified their survival” (Contemporary Novelists, 634). Stylistically, Jacob Lawrence’s haunting illustrations, printed in 11 colors, owe an obvious debt to Cubism and Matisse: “the flat, sharp overlaps of form, the reliance on silhouette, and a high degree of abstraction in the color. But there is something more demotic behind those colors. They came, as Lawrence acknowledged, more from his experience in Harlem than from other art” (Robert Hughes). LEC 535. Pristine, fine condition.