Dramatist, newspaperman, and freelance writer Burnet Hershey was born Jacob Bughici Hirsch in Romania on December 13, 1896. In 1899 his parents, Josef and Bertha Hirsch, brought him and their other children to the United States. There, he attended public schools in New York City and pursued advanced studies at the Columbia School of Journalism in 1914. Soon after, he became a general news reporter for the New York Sun. In 1915 the New York Post assigned him to cover Henry Ford's Peace Expedition. Following the outbreak of World War I, Hershey was an accredited correspondent for both the Allies and the German armies for the New York Times. He covered the Versailles Peace Conference for the New York Sun. The important collection of documents Hershey gathered at the conference was eventually donated to Yeshiva University. After the war Hershey remained abroad, traveling extensively to report on news events, first for the Sun and later for syndication by the Philadelphia Public Ledger. It was sometime during this period that Hirsch began to write under the name Burnet Hershey.
During the 1920s Hershey worked in theatre and vaudeville in New York City, primarily writing comedy sketches in collaboration with Stanley Rauh and others. His most successful stage work during this period consisted of The Bandit Prince, a play that starred Sessue Hayakawa, and “The Barber of Sayville, L.I.,” which was purchased by George M. Cohan in 1930, but never produced. In 1927 the Fox Film Corporation hired Hershey to write scenarios and title silent films. In 1930 Hershey relocated to New York where he worked as a scenarist and writer of dialogues for the short films produced at Vitaphone, the Warner Brothers eastern studio. During the period from 1930 to 1933 he worked on over 200 releases. Among Hershey's projects were the Lowell Thomas travelogues, “Ripley's Believe it or Not,” the S.S. Van Dine mysteries, Officer's Mess (1935), Hi De Ho (1937), and Nothing Ever Happens (1933). He also created the short films in which many Hollywood stars made their first screen appearance. During periods of unemployment at Vitaphone Hershey supported himself with other literary genres including free lance articles and short stories, the book It's a Small World (1934), and the film documentaries Dealers in Death (1934) and The Next War (1934), as well as writing free lance scripts for other film studies. In 1939 his anti-Nazi play, The Brown Danube, opened at the Lyceum Theatre in 1939.
During the early 1940s Hershey emerged as a well known personality in New York City. His regular radio news and commentary broadcasts on WMAC had a large audience, and he was frequently mentioned in the society columns of Elsa Maxwell and Leonard Lyons. He also served as president of the Overseas Press Club and expanded its functions and importance. In 1943 he published Air Future: A Primer for Aeropolitics. During World War II Hershey returned to news reporting, covering the war in Britain, North Africa, and Allied headquarters for INS and the New York Post. While he was in Paris in 1945 Hershey launched the Association of American War Correspondents (AAWC), and in 1949 the AAWC elected him president.
Following the war Hershey began a career as an international trade negotiator. He was actively involved with Etienne Romano, a French inventor and aircraft manufacturer.
Burnet Hershey retired from journalism in the late 1950s although he continued to write for a number of years, publishing Dag Hammarskjold, a biography in 1961; Odyssey of Henry Ford and the Great Peace Ship in 1967, which was based in part on his own experiences; and the novel you Can't Go to Heaven on a Rollerskate in 1969.
Burnet Hershey was married twice, although the collection contains only limited information about his marriages. He married Adele Allerhand, a writer and publicist, in 1930. They divorced in 1932. In June 1935 he married Thurza Putnam Sturges, also a writer. Hershey died on December 13, 1971 after a brief illness while visiting relatives in Miami Beach.
