John Hersey Apologizes for Lifting Facts and Phrases

NEW YORK — Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey has acknowledged appropriating another writer’s facts and phrases without attribution for a New Yorker article on novelist James Agee, and he offered an apology.

The flap developed after Laurence Bergreen, author of “James Agee: A Life,” noticed as many as 20 parallel passages in Hersey’s article about Agee in the magazine’s July 18 issue, the New York Times said today.

“It seemed to me that once you got beyond the opening anecdote in which (Hersey) described his meeting with Agee that the whole article was a condensation of my biography,” Bergreen told the newspaper.

Bergreen Calls Attorney

Bergreen said he contacted his lawyer after he learned that the Hersey article was going to be reprinted this fall by Houghton Mifflin as the preface to a new edition of Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”

Hersey, who won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1945 with his “A Bell for Adano,” told the newspaper in a telephone interview from his home at Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.: “Where I quoted directly, I gave credit.

“But since Mr. Bergreen’s biography is the most comprehensive so far published, I should have given him some direct credit, and that I will now do.”

Hersey said he did not think he made a big mistake. “I’m very sorry if I’ve offended Mr. Bergreen. I don’t believe my real offense in terms of normal practice is great,” he said.

“There’s always a fine line between facts and the work of another writer.”