Master Novelist

"It's your baby," says President Kingman Brewster when he appoints a new master to one of Yale's twelve residential colleges. "You take the college where you want it to go." Last week, breaking the tradition of choosing masters from the academic world, Brewster named John Hersey, 50, master of Pierson College, in an experiment to find where a nonacademic novelist and journalist will want a college to go.

Loosely modeled after the ancient college enclaves of Oxford and Cambridge, the Yale colleges, like the Harvard "houses," were organized in the early 1930s to form small academic and social communities within the increasingly impersonal hustle of the modern university. At both universities the college system, its evolution slowed by World War II and the aftermath, is still in flux, and each new master has an opportunity to shape its eventual pattern. Counselor and friend, social leader and intellectual mentor, the master presides over the college's 300 to 400 students from his house in the quadrangle. His personality becomes the college's, and realizes or denies the original ideal.

The Best Man. Because of this, Hersey's appointment was accepted with enthusiasm at Yale. "It was an absolute brainstorm to have that kind of person come in here," said Composer Quincy

Porter, who will retire as master of Pierson when Hersey takes over in July. Brewster admitted that it was "seemingly" a departure from Yale tradition, yet denied any conscious effort to break the pattern: "I was just looking for the man who could do the best job."

Even though he will have no teaching assignments, Hersey may find it hard to keep up his prolific writing and meet the time-consuming demands of the college. "It's a beast of a problem," confesses the Rev. B. Davie Napier, master of Calhoun and Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation. "It is a deep involvement in the lives of other people. But nobody has a chance to shape, improve, and inspire this collective education as the master does." Thomas G. Bergin, master of Timothy Dwight, who found time to write a new study of Dante, thinks that the job gives "a sense of being in contact, keeping up with the young men."

Tientsin to Adano. To Pierson's neo-Georgian-style quadrangle, Hersey will bring a rich and varied experience. Born in Tientsin, the son of Christian missionaries, he spoke Chinese fluently before he knew a word of English. When he was ten, his family returned to the U.S., and Hersey attended Hotchkiss and Yale ('36). After a postgraduate year at Cambridge, he came back to be secretary to Sinclair Lewis, then war correspondent for TIME and LIFE. His third book, A Bell for Adano, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 and was followed by the celebrated account of the Hiroshima bombing. His newest novel is White Lotus, an allegory in which white Americans are forced to experience--in a Chinese setting--the centuries-long bondage of American Negroes.

One side effect of his appointment was a certain small boost in sales. "I've read several of his books already," said Lance Fletcher, Pierson librarian. "I went out today and ordered the rest for the library."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.