Eight screenprints on Somerset paper
From hand color-separated photo stencils
Edition of 35 with 10 AP, 5 pp
Screens destroyed
Image: 12 7/8 x 10 (32.7 x 25.5)
Paper: 14 7/8 x 11½ (37.8 x 28.2)

Each print signed and dated bottom right Jacob Lawrence 83, numbered bottom left in pencil below the image; no printer's chop mark.

Published by the Limited Editions Club, New York; printed by Studio Heinrici, New York (Alexander Heinrici, master printer). The portfolio includes a signed poem by Robert Penn Warren.

Also published as illustrations in Hiroshima, a special edition book (edition of 1,500) with text by John Hersey. The book includes the Penn Warren poem and is signed on the colophon page by all three collaborators. Hersey's text was originally published in the New Yorker, June 1946.

“Several years ago I was invited by the Limited Editions Club of New York to illustrate a book of my choosing from a list of the club's many titles. I selected the book Hiroshima, written by the brilliant writer John Hersey This work was selected because of its power, insight, scope, and sensitivity as well as for its overall content My intent was to illustrate a series of events that were taking place at the moment of the dropping of the bomb... August 6, 1945. The challenge for me was to execute eight works: a marketplace, a playground, a street scene, a park, farmers, a family scene, a man with birds, and a boy with a kite. Not a particular country, not a particular city and not a particular people.

"Is it not ironic that we have produced great scientists, great musicians, great orators, chess players, philosophers, poets and great teachers and, at the same time, we have developed the capability and the genius to create the means to devastate and to completely destroy our planet earth with all its life and beauty? How could we develop such creative minds and, at the same time develop such a destructive instrument? Only God knows the answer Let us hope that some day at some time, He will give us the answer to this very perplexing question."