From Anxiety to Irony In the years just after World War II, literature dealt with the grief and shock of the conflict. Journalist John Hersey's Hiroshima appeared in 1946, graphically depicting the effects of the atomic bomb on the lives of ordinary Japanese citizens. In 1948, Randall Jarrell published Losses, intense poems that captured the feeling of postwar emptiness. By the 1960s, however, some writers were treating the war with tragicomic irony. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 in 1961 and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s, Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969 mixed bitterness with absurdity and fantasy that helped to distance readers from the mid-century violence.