Pete Hamill

journalist, author

Bio

Pete Hamill is an American journalist, novelist, essayist, editor and educator. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He is the author of twenty previous books, including the bestselling novels Forever and Snow in August and the bestselling memoir A Drinking Life.

 

In the summer of 1960, Hamill went to work as a reporter for the New York Post and began to learn his craft (the story is told in his 1994 memoir, A Drinking Life.) In 1962-63, a prolonged newspaper strike led him to writing magazine articles and by the fall of 1963 he was in Europe as a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post. Based for six months in Barcelona, and five months in Dublin, he roamed Europe, interviewing actors, movie directors, novelists and ordinary citizens. He was in Belfast with his father on Nov. 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and he witnessed both sides of the sectarian quarrel mourning the fallen American president.

 

Hamill returned to New York in August 1964, covered the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, and worked briefly at the New York Herald Tribune as a feature writer. In the fall of 1965, he started writing a column for the New York Post. By Christmas, he was in Vietnam. His newspaper career would go on for decades, at the Post, the New York Daily News, the Village Voice, and New York Newsday. He would serve briefly as editor of the Post, and later as editor-in-chief-of the Daily News. His longer journalistic work has appeared in New York magazine, The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and other periodicals.

                                                                                 

In 1968, Hamill published his first novel, a thriller called A Killing for Christ, about a plot to assassinate the Pope on Easter Sunday in Rome. This was followed by a short semi-autobiographical novel called The Gift, where he first began using his Brooklyn roots in a fictional form. Most of his fiction is also set in New York City, including Snow in August (1997), Forever (2003), and North River (2007). All were from Little, Brown and Company, as is his eleventh novel, Tabloid City, published in May 2011.

 

In addition, he has published more than 100 short stories in newspapers, following the example of fiction writers from O. Henry to Alberto Moravia. In the New York Post, the Hamill short stories were part of a series called "The Eight Million." In the Daily News, the stories ran under the title "Tales of New York."  He has published two volumes of short stories: The Invisible City: A New York Sketchbook (Random House. 1980) and Tokyo Sketches (Kodansha. 1992).   He lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Fukiko Aoki. He has two daughters and one grandson.