born June 17, 1914, Tianjin, China
died March 24, 1993, Key West, Fla., U.S.
Chinese-born U.S. novelist and journalist.
Born to missionaries, he worked as a correspondent in East Asia, Italy, and the Soviet Union in the years 1937–46. His novel A Bell for Adano (1944, Pulitzer Prize) depicts the Allied occupation of a Sicilian town. Hiroshima (1946), about the experiences of atomic-blast survivors, and The Wall (1950), about the Warsaw ghetto uprisings, combine fact and fiction. His later novels encompassed a wide variety of subjects from contemporary issues to moral parables set in the future.