DIED. John Hersey, 78, novelist and war correspondent; in Key West, Florida. Hersey was born in China to traveling American missionaries. Early in his writing career he covered the Far East as a TIME correspondent. Hersey's 1945 novel, A Bell for Adano, which won him a Pulitzer Prize, and his 1946 Hiroshima, a searing report of the world's first atom bombing, are considered classics of war literature.