Pete Hamill
Encyclopedia
Pete Hamill 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.
. 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 casher in the RKO movie chain.
Hamill attended Holy Name of Jesus grammar school and delivered the Brooklyn Daily Eagle when he was 11. 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. Inspired especially by the work of Milton Caniff
, he was set on becoming a comic book artist. Hamill attended night classes at the School of Visual Arts
(then called the Cartoonists and Illustrators School), with the goal of becoming a painter. 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. 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
.
His brothers Denis and John Hamill are also writers. Denis writes for the New York Daily News. His other siblings are Joe (deceased), Brian, and Kathleen. Hamill has two daughters named Adriene and Deirdre. Hamill lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Fukiko Aoki.
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.
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. 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, 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. 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
.
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 has published more than 100 short stories in newspapers, including those that were part of a series called The Eight Million in the New York Post; in the Daily News, his stories ran under the title Tales of New York. He has published two volumes of short stories: The Invisible City: A New York Sketchbook (1980) and Tokyo Sketches (1992).
was inspired by the book to complete his own memoir, Angela's Ashes
. 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.
His book on the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera
was inspired by time spent in Mexico City in 1957 and his presence at Rivera’s funeral. In Tools as Art (1995), Hamill surveys the Hechinger Collection and the incorporation of utilitarian objects for aesthetic ends. His biographical essay on the artist was featured in Underground Together: The Art and Life of Harvey Dinnerstein
(2008), whose work, like Hamill’s, often focuses on the people and cultural life of Brooklyn.
Hamill’s interest in photography has informed recent essays in nonfiction. New York: City of Islands (2007), celebrates the photography of Jake Rajs. New York Exposed: Photographs from the Daily News (2001) contains an extended essay about the New York Daily News and its role in American photojournalism
. In his introduction to Mexico: The Revolution and Beyond (2003), Hamill writes about Agustin Victor Casasola, whose photographs recorded the Revolution of 1910-1920. In his introduction to A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward (2007), Hamill evokes the heyday of American Yiddish journalism. His text for The Times Square Gym (1996) enhances John Goodman's photographs of prizefighters, and his introduction to Garden of Dreams: Madison Square Garden (2004) offers a context for the sports photography of George Kalinski. Hamill’s Irish heritage informs the text for The Irish Face in America (2004), as seen by the photographer Jim Smith.
Hamill has also written about comic strips, of which he is a collector. Among his writings on the subject are an introduction to Terry and the Pirates
: Volume Two by Milton Caniff (2007), and an introductory text for a revised version of Al Hirschfeld
's The Speakeasies of 1932 (2003). He also contributed an introduction to Jerry Robinson
: Ambassador of Comics (2010).
Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists in 2005. In 2010 Hamill received an Honorary Doctor of Letters Degree from St. John’s University. In 2010 he was presented the Louis Auchincloss Prize from the Museum of the City of New York
.
Hamill is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.
New York Post
The New York Post is the 13th-oldest newspaper published in the United States and is generally acknowledged as the oldest to have been published continuously as a daily, although – as is the case with most other papers – its publication has been periodically interrupted by labor actions...
and The New York Daily News.
Biography
The eldest of seven children of Catholic immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Pete Hamill was born in the Park Slope section of BrooklynBrooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
. 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
Wanamaker's
Wanamaker's department store was the first department store in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and one of the first department stores in the United States. At its zenith in the early 20th century, there were two major Wanamaker department stores, one in Philadelphia and one in New York City at Broadway...
department store, and also worked as a domestic, a nurses' aide, and a casher in the RKO movie chain.
Hamill attended Holy Name of Jesus grammar school and delivered the Brooklyn Daily Eagle when he was 11. 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
Brooklyn Navy Yard
The United States Navy Yard, New York–better known as the Brooklyn Navy Yard or the New York Naval Shipyard –was an American shipyard located in Brooklyn, northeast of the Battery on the East River in Wallabout Basin, a semicircular bend of the river across from Corlear's Hook in Manhattan...
; 59 years later, in June 2010, Regis awarded him an honorary diploma. Inspired especially by the work of Milton Caniff
Milton Caniff
Milton Arthur Paul Caniff was an American cartoonist famous for the Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon comic strips.-Biography:...
, he was set on becoming a comic book artist. Hamill attended night classes at the School of Visual Arts
School of Visual Arts
The School of Visual Arts , is a proprietary art school located in Manhattan, New York City, and is widely considered to be one of the leading art schools in the United States. It was established in 1947 by co-founders Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and...
(then called the Cartoonists and Illustrators School), with the goal of becoming a painter. 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
Mexico City College
Mexico City College was founded in 1940, as an English speaking junior college in Mexico City, Mexico.In 1946 the college switched to a 4 year Bachelor of Arts degree-awarding institution, then changed its name to University of the Americas in 1963 and in 1968 to Universidad de las Americas,...
on the G.I. Bill. Hamill has also lived in Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
, Ireland
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
, San Juan, Puerto Rico
San Juan, Puerto Rico
San Juan , officially Municipio de la Ciudad Capital San Juan Bautista , is the capital and most populous municipality in Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the United States. As of the 2010 census, it had a population of 395,326 making it the 46th-largest city under the jurisdiction of...
, Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
, Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, and Santa Fe, New Mexico
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Santa Fe is the capital of the U.S. state of New Mexico. It is the fourth-largest city in the state and is the seat of . Santa Fe had a population of 67,947 in the 2010 census...
.
A friend of Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy
Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy , also referred to by his initials RFK, was an American politician, a Democratic senator from New York, and a noted civil rights activist. An icon of modern American liberalism and member of the Kennedy family, he was a younger brother of President John F...
, 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
Sirhan Sirhan
Sirhan Bishara Sirhan is a Jordanian citizen who was convicted for the assassination of United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He is serving a life sentence at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California.Sirhan was a Christian Arab born in Jerusalem who strongly opposed Israel...
of his gun in the aftermath of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination
Robert F. Kennedy assassination
The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, a United States Senator and brother of assassinated President John F. Kennedy, took place shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, in Los Angeles, California...
.
His brothers Denis and John Hamill are also writers. Denis writes for the New York Daily News. His other siblings are Joe (deceased), Brian, and Kathleen. Hamill has two daughters named Adriene and Deirdre. Hamill lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Fukiko Aoki.
Journalism
Hamill began to work as a reporter for the New York Post in 1960. A printers’ strike shut down the newspapers in New York City in 1962-63, and led Hamill to writing magazine articles. By the fall of 1963 he was a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, stationed in Europe. Hamill spent six months in BarcelonaBarcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
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
New York Herald Tribune
The New York Herald Tribune was a daily newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald.Other predecessors, which had earlier merged into the New York Tribune, included the original The New Yorker newsweekly , and the Whig Party's Log Cabin.The paper was home to...
. He began writing a column for the New York Post in late 1965, and by the end of that year was reporting from Vietnam.
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. Hamill’s more extensive journalistic pieces have been published in New York
New York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
, The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
, Playboy
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...
, Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
, and other periodicals. He has written about wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland, 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. He also wrote about boxing, baseball, art, and contemporary music, winning a Grammy Award
Grammy Award
A Grammy Award — or Grammy — is an accolade by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry...
in 1975 for the liner notes to Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
's Blood on the Tracks
Blood on the Tracks
Blood on the Tracks is Bob Dylan's 15th studio album, released by Columbia Records in January 1975. The album marked Dylan's return to Columbia after a two-album stint with Asylum Records....
.
Two collections of his selected journalism have been published: Irrational Ravings and Piecework (1996). For the Library of America
Library of America
The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
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.
Fiction
Hamill has also written fiction, producing ten novels and two collections of short stories. His first novel, a thriller called A Killing for Christ, about a plot to assassinate the Pope on Easter Sunday in Rome, was published in 1968. Drawing on his youth in Brooklyn he next wrote a semi-autobiographical novel called The Gift. Most of his fiction is set in New York City, including Snow in August (1997), Forever (2003), North River (2007), and Tabloid City, to be published in May 2011.Hamill has published more than 100 short stories in newspapers, including those that were part of a series called The Eight Million in the New York Post; in the Daily News, his stories ran under the title Tales of New York. He has published two volumes of short stories: The Invisible City: A New York Sketchbook (1980) and Tokyo Sketches (1992).
Non Fiction
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; according to Hamill, Frank McCourtFrank McCourt
Francis "Frank" McCourt was an Irish-American teacher and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, best known as the author of Angela’s Ashes, an award-winning, tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood....
was inspired by the book to complete his own memoir, Angela's Ashes
Angela's Ashes
Angela's Ashes is a 1996 memoir by the Irish-American author Frank McCourt. The memoir consists of various anecdotes and stories of Frank McCourt's impoverished childhood and early adulthood in Brooklyn, New York and Limerick, Ireland, as well as McCourt's struggles with poverty, his father's...
. Hamill's memoir Downtown: My Manhattan includes his reporting for the New York Daily News on the destruction of the World Trade Center
World Trade Center
The original World Trade Center was a complex with seven buildings featuring landmark twin towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. The complex opened on April 4, 1973, and was destroyed in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. The site is currently being rebuilt with five new...
on September 11, 2001, at which he was present.
His book on the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was a prominent Mexican painter born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, an active communist, and husband of Frida Kahlo . His large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in...
was inspired by time spent in Mexico City in 1957 and his presence at Rivera’s funeral. In Tools as Art (1995), Hamill surveys the Hechinger Collection and the incorporation of utilitarian objects for aesthetic ends. His biographical essay on the artist was featured in Underground Together: The Art and Life of Harvey Dinnerstein
Harvey Dinnerstein
Harvey Dinnerstein , is a figurative artist and educator. A draftsman and painter in the realistic tradition, his work has included genre paintings, contemporary narratives, complex figurative compositions, portraits, and intimate images of his family and friends.Dinnerstein was born in Brooklyn,...
(2008), whose work, like Hamill’s, often focuses on the people and cultural life of Brooklyn.
Hamill’s interest in photography has informed recent essays in nonfiction. New York: City of Islands (2007), celebrates the photography of Jake Rajs. New York Exposed: Photographs from the Daily News (2001) contains an extended essay about the New York Daily News and its role in American photojournalism
Photojournalism
Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism that creates images in order to tell a news story. It is now usually understood to refer only to still images, but in some cases the term also refers to video used in broadcast journalism...
. In his introduction to Mexico: The Revolution and Beyond (2003), Hamill writes about Agustin Victor Casasola, whose photographs recorded the Revolution of 1910-1920. In his introduction to A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward (2007), Hamill evokes the heyday of American Yiddish journalism. His text for The Times Square Gym (1996) enhances John Goodman's photographs of prizefighters, and his introduction to Garden of Dreams: Madison Square Garden (2004) offers a context for the sports photography of George Kalinski. Hamill’s Irish heritage informs the text for The Irish Face in America (2004), as seen by the photographer Jim Smith.
Hamill has also written about comic strips, of which he is a collector. Among his writings on the subject are an introduction to Terry and the Pirates
Terry and the Pirates
Terry and the Pirates is the title of:* Terry and the Pirates , the comic strip created by Milton Caniff* Terry and the Pirates , a radio serial based on the comic strip...
: Volume Two by Milton Caniff (2007), and an introductory text for a revised version of Al Hirschfeld
Al Hirschfeld
Albert "Al" Hirschfeld was an American caricaturist best known for his simple black and white portraits of celebrities and Broadway stars.-Personal life:Born in St...
's The Speakeasies of 1932 (2003). He also contributed an introduction to Jerry Robinson
Jerry Robinson
Jerry Robinson is an American comic book artist best known for his work on DC Comics' Batman line of comics during the 1940s.He was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2004.-Career:...
: Ambassador of Comics (2010).
Honors
Hamill received the Ernie PyleErnie Pyle
Ernest Taylor Pyle was an American journalist who wrote as a roving correspondent for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain from 1935 until his death in combat during World War II. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944...
Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists in 2005. In 2010 Hamill received an Honorary Doctor of Letters Degree from St. John’s University. In 2010 he was presented the Louis Auchincloss Prize from the Museum of the City of New York
Museum of the City of New York
The Museum of the City of New York is an art gallery and history museum founded in 1923 to present the history of New York City, USA and its people...
.
Hamill is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.
External links
- Official website
- 1993 audio interview of Pete Hamill at Wired for Books.org by Don SwaimDon SwaimDon Swaim is an American journalist and broadcaster.Born in Kansas, Swaim earned a degree in broadcast journalism from Ohio University and worked as editor, writer, producer, reporter and anchor at WCBS in New York and CBS in Baltimore....
- PBS interview with Hamill
- Review of Hamill's novel Forever
- "Pete Hamill Revisits The Newsroom In 'Tabloid City'", interview with Dave Davies of Fresh Air, May 5, 2011.