Hiroshima by John Hersey
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50 free Hiroshima by John Hersey trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
John Hersey's Hiroshima is one of the most widely taught works of non-fiction in English. Written a year after the atomic bomb, it follows six people who lived through the morning of August 6, 1945: a young clerk, two doctors, a widow with three children, a foreign priest and a Japanese pastor. Hersey tells their stories in plain, quiet prose and lets the details do the work, which is why the book still unsettles readers generations later. This quiz covers the book the way a class or a reading group would. There are questions on each of the six survivors: where they were when the flash came, what they lost, and how they helped others in the hours that followed. Others follow the chapters in order, from the first moments through the days of sickness and slow recovery, and on to the final chapter Hersey added forty years later about what became of everyone. A last group looks at the author himself and at how the report was first published and received. It suits students revising for a reading quiz or a test, teachers who want ready-made questions with explanations, and anyone who has just finished the book and wants to see how much of it stayed with them. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even from the ones you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which magazine gave the whole editorial space of one August 1946 issue to John Hersey's Hiroshima?
The New Yorker
The New Yorker had planned to run the piece over four issues, then printed it all at once. The issue sold out at newsstands within hours.
Q 02Which famous physicist tried to order 1,000 copies of the magazine issue carrying John Hersey's Hiroshima?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein wanted the copies to send to fellow scientists, but the issue had sold out and he had to settle for facsimiles.
Q 03What did the cover illustration show on the magazine issue that first carried John Hersey's Hiroshima?
A summer day outdoors
The cover showed a summer day outdoors, a playful, carefree drawing that gave no hint of the report inside. The editors had kept the contents secret even from most of their own staff.
Q 04What crushed the leg of the clerk Miss Toshiko Sasaki when the bomb struck in John Hersey's Hiroshima?
Falling bookcases
Falling bookcases pinned her beneath the factory's library, breaking her left leg. She lay unconscious in the wreckage for about three hours.
Q 05On which American TV show did the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto of Hersey's Hiroshima meet a member of the bomber crew?
This Is Your Life
This Is Your Life brought on Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, to shake the pastor's hand in 1955. Tanimoto had been told he was coming for an ordinary interview.
Q 06What happened to Dr. Masakazu Fujii's private hospital at the moment of the blast in John Hersey's Hiroshima?
It toppled into a river
It toppled into a river with the doctor still on its porch, leaving him wedged between two timbers with only his head above the water.
Q 07Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, the one foreigner among the six survivors in Hersey's Hiroshima, came from which country?
Germany
Germany was Japan's wartime ally, yet the priest still felt the strain of being a foreigner there. He had been weakened by the thin wartime diet when the bomb exploded.
Q 08Which prized possession did Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura sink in a water tank as she fled her house in Hersey's Hiroshima?
Her sewing machine
Her sewing machine was the widow's only way of earning a living, so she plunged it into the cement tank outside her house. Weeks later it was found rusted and useless.
Q 09Whose voice did the people in John Hersey's Hiroshima hear on the radio for the first time on August 15, 1945?
Emperor Hirohito
Emperor Hirohito announced in person that the war was over, and listeners in the ruins wept simply to hear him speak to ordinary people. The broadcast closes the book's third chapter.
Q 10In which country was John Hersey, the author of Hiroshima, born to American missionary parents?
China
China was his home until he was ten, and he learned to speak Chinese before he spoke English. He later went back to Asia as a war correspondent.
Q 11A 1954 magazine article by John Hersey, author of Hiroshima, about dull school readers inspired which children's book?
The Cat in the Hat
The Cat in the Hat was Dr. Seuss's answer to Hersey's complaint in Life magazine that school primers were too dull to teach children to read.
Q 12The author of Hiroshima earlier wrote a celebrated wartime account of which future president's survival in the Pacific?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy's ordeal aboard PT-109 became Hersey's article Survival. Life turned the piece down, and reprints later helped Kennedy's election campaigns.
Q 13What did the injured clerk Toshiko Sasaki become in later life, according to the final chapter of Hersey's Hiroshima?
Q 21What set the young Dr. Terufumi Sasaki apart from every other doctor at the Red Cross Hospital in Hersey's Hiroshima?
He was unhurt
He was unhurt, so the 25-year-old faced a tide of some ten thousand wounded making for the building. He worked nineteen hours before he first tried to sleep.
Q 22Where did John Hersey, author of Hiroshima, study and later teach writing for eighteen years?
Yale University
Yale University also made him master of Pierson College in 1965, the first non-academic to run one of its residential colleges. The film critic Gene Siskel was among his students.
Q 23For what purpose did the young women called the Hiroshima Maidens travel to New York in 1955, as Hersey's book recounts?
A Catholic nun
A Catholic nun known as Sister Dominique, she went on to direct a home for old people for twenty years. Her faith grew out of bedside talks with Father Kleinsorge.
Q 14At what local time does the atomic bomb flash over the city in the opening sentence of John Hersey's Hiroshima?
8:15 a.m.
8:15 a.m. is fixed in the first words of the book, which then shows where each of the six survivors stood at that instant. The all-clear siren had sounded only minutes before.
Q 15Panic grass and feverfew, which name the fourth chapter of John Hersey's Hiroshima, are what?
Weeds growing in the ruins
Weeds growing in the ruins amazed Miss Sasaki when she was driven back into the city a month later: the bomb seemed to have stimulated the roots, and fresh green covered the wreckage.
Q 16John Hersey's Hiroshima is often called an early example of which style that tells true events with a novelist's tools?
New Journalism
New Journalism is usually tied to 1960s writers such as Tom Wolfe, but Hersey was doing it in 1946. He later criticised the movement for being careless with facts.
Q 17Which Japanese word for bomb survivors, used in Hersey's Hiroshima, was chosen to avoid slighting those who died?
Hibakusha
Hibakusha literally means explosion-affected people. For years many employers refused to hire them, believing they could not work as hard as others.
Q 18Which general led the occupation government that discouraged publishers from issuing John Hersey's Hiroshima in Japan?
Douglas MacArthur
Douglas MacArthur later insisted the book had never been banned, but a Japanese translation did not appear until 1949. It has stayed in print there ever since.
Q 19What happened to Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura about two weeks after the bombing, in the fourth chapter of Hersey's Hiroshima?
Her hair fell out
Her hair fell out over three or four days, leaving her quite bald, and she hid indoors until it grew back. Nobody yet had a name for the illness behind it.
Q 20How did the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto carry badly wounded survivors away from the fire in Hersey's Hiroshima?
He ferried them by boat
He ferried them by boat, ten or twelve at a time, pushing the heavy punt along with a bamboo pole because it had no oars.
Plastic surgery
Plastic surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital awaited the 25 women, who had been disfigured as schoolgirls by the bomb's flash. Dr. Fujii joined them the next year and interpreted between doctors and patients.
Q 24To which Protestant denomination did the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto's church belong in John Hersey's Hiroshima?
Methodist
Methodist mission boards later brought the pastor to the United States on speaking tours, where he raised money to rebuild his wrecked church.
Q 25Which novel won John Hersey the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, the year before he wrote Hiroshima?
A Bell for Adano
A Bell for Adano follows an American major running an occupied Sicilian town who tries to replace its 700-year-old bell. It was filmed the same year with Gene Tierney.
Q 26How did Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge of Hersey's Hiroshima show devotion to his adopted country after the war?
Took Japanese citizenship
He took Japanese citizenship and with it a new name, Father Makoto Takakura. Radiation illness dogged him for the rest of his life, and he died in 1977.
Q 27At which company was Miss Toshiko Sasaki a personnel clerk on the morning of the bombing in Hersey's Hiroshima?
East Asia Tin Works
East Asia Tin Works stood about 1,600 yards from the centre of the blast. She had been up since three that morning doing her family's housework.
Q 28Where in the United States had the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto of Hersey's Hiroshima studied theology before the war?
Emory University
Emory University left him with fluent English and American clothes, which made some neighbours suspect him of spying. The police had questioned him several times.
Q 29Where did Mrs. Nakamura, Father Kleinsorge and Mr. Tanimoto all shelter from the fires in Hersey's Hiroshima?
Asano Park
Asano Park was a wealthy family's garden marked as an evacuation area, and its woods drew hundreds of wounded who hoped the trees would hide them from another raid.
Q 30What did the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto read to the dying Mr. Tanaka, who had once denounced him, in Hersey's Hiroshima?
An Old Testament psalm
An Old Testament psalm was what the pastor chose for the rich man who had called him an American spy, and Mr. Tanaka died as he read it.