Pete Hamill (born June 24, 1935) is an American journalist, novelist, essayist, editor and educator. Widely traveled and having written on a broad range of topics, he is perhaps best known for his career as a New York City journalist, as "the author of columns that sought to capture the particular flavors of New York City's politics and sports and the particular pathos of its crime." Hamill was a columnist and editor for the New York Post and The New York Daily News. The eldest of seven children of Catholic immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Pete Hamill was born in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. His father, Billy Hamill, lost a leg as the result of an injury in a semi-pro soccer game in Brooklyn. Hamill's mother, Anne Devlin, a high school graduate in Belfast, arrived in New York on the day the stock market crashed in 1929. Billy Hamill met Anne Devlin in 1933 and they married the following year. Billy Hamill had jobs as a grocery clerk, in a war plant, and later in a factory producing lighting fixtures. Anne Hamill was employed in Wanamaker's department store, and also worked as a domestic, a nurses' aide, and a cashier in the RKO movie chain.[6] Hamill attended Holy Name of Jesus grammar school[7] and delivered the Brooklyn Daily Eagle when he was 11.[8] In 1949, Hamill attended the prestigious Regis High School in Manhattan, but left school when he was 15 to work as an apprentice sheet metal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard; 59 years later, in June 2010, Regis awarded him an honorary diploma.[9] Inspired especially by the work of Milton Caniff, he was set on becoming a comic book artist.[10] Hamill attended night classes at the School of Visual Arts (then called the Cartoonists and Illustrators School),[11] with the goal of becoming a painter.[12] In the fall of 1952, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. After his discharge, in 1956-57, he was a student at Mexico City College on the G.I. Bill.[13] Hamill has also lived in Spain, Ireland, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Rome, Los Angeles, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. A friend of Robert F. Kennedy, Hamill helped persuade the senator to run for the United States presidency, then worked for the campaign and covered it as a journalist. He was one of four men who disarmed Sirhan Sirhan of his gun in the aftermath of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination.[14] Hamill began to work as a reporter for the New York Post in 1960.[15] The 1962--63 New York City newspaper strike led Hamill to start writing magazine articles. By the fall of 1963 he was a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, stationed in Europe.[16] Hamill spent six months in Barcelona and five months in Dublin, and traveled Europe interviewing actors, movie directors, and authors, as well as ordinary citizens. In August 1964 he returned to New York, reported on the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, and was briefly employed as a feature writer at the New York Herald Tribune. He began writing a column for the New York Post in late 1965, and by the end of that year was reporting from Vietnam.[17] Over the course of nearly forty years Hamill worked at the Post, the New York Daily News, the Village Voice, and New York Newsday. He served briefly as editor of the Post, and later as editor-in-chief-of the Daily News. His resignation from the latter position after eight months prompted a letter of protest signed by more than a hundred of the paper's writers.[18] Hamill's more extensive journalistic pieces have been published in New York, The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and other periodicals. He has written about wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland,[19] and reported on America's urban riots of the 1960s. Hamill wrote about the New York underclass and racial division, most notably in an essay for Esquire magazine entitled Breaking the Silence.[20] He also wrote about boxing, baseball, art, and contemporary music, winning a Grammy Award in 1975 for the liner notes to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks.[21] Two collections of his selected journalism have been published: Irrational Ravings and Piecework (1996). For the Library of America he edited two volumes of the journalism of A.J. Liebling. In 1998, he published an extended essay on contemporary journalism titled News is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century. Hamill's 1994 memoir, A Drinking Life, chronicled his journey from childhood into his thirties, his embrace of drinking and the decision to abandon it.[22] According to Hamill, Frank McCourt was inspired by the book to complete his own memoir, Angela's Ashes.[23] Hamill's memoir Downtown: My Manhattan includes his reporting for the New York Daily News on the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, at which he was present.

• published: 01 May 2014
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