Literary Aftershocks: American Writers, Readers, and the Bomb

Literary Aftershocks: American Writers, Readers, and the Bomb. Albert E. Stone. New York: Twayne Publishers; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan, 1994. $26.95 hardcover. Includes index, bibliography, and chronology.

The first half-century since the first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, has passed, and, to the surprise of many, we have lived to begin the second. Less surprising than our collective survival in the face of the real possibility of global annihilation, was the creation during those fifty years of a wide range of literary texts deeply imbued with an awareness of the challenges-and perils-that blossomed along with mushroom clouds over the American cultural landscape. Albert Stone has taken on the daunting but important task of surveying and analyzing the literature created in the shadow of those radioactive clouds, and has produced an illuminating and useful discussion summarizing his insights into five "modal traditions in written expression and communication about the Bomb" (p. xviii).

His first chapter, "The Common Medium and the Unique Event," presents an extended discussion of three "masterpieces" of nonfiction prose, John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946), Robert Jay Lifton's Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967), and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth (1982). Stone believes that these texts, all major bestsellers, provided the essential information and language necessary to the formation of common understanding of the meaning of the atomic age. Specifically, he suggests that Hersey's careful selection of details about six survivors of the Hiroshima bomb, Lifton's careful exploration of "basic psychological affinities linking all survivors of extreme experience" (p. 18), and Schell's "penchant for piling up the extreme instance and the direst consequence" (p. 27) shared the common critical and political purpose of encouraging the widespread adoption by Americans of an attitude of "compassionate identification" with the victims of the United States' atomic weaponry. Further, Stone argues that the success of these authors' efforts enabled their audiences imaginatively to understand themselves as the potential victims of that weaponry, thus serving as essential cultural/structural elements in the evolution of broadly diffused anti-nuclear sentiment in the United States.

Stone continues his history of the literature of the first fifty years of the Atomic Age through five more chapters, each approaching a different aspect of authors' imaginative participation in nuclear culture.

In "Fictions...