Pete Hamill
Distinguished Writer in Residence / Author
New York University

Biography

Pete Hamill is a veteran journalist and the author of 20 published books, ten of them novels. His latest novel, “North River”, was published by Little, Brown in June 2007.

He was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. on June 24, 1935, the first of seven children of William and Anne Hamill, who were immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland. As a child, he graduated from Holy Name School in Brooklyn, and then went on to the prestigious Regis H.S., a Jesuit institution in Manhattan.

In 1959, at the age of 16, he dropped out of Regis, spent a few months at St. Agnes HS in Manhattan, and then moved on to the New York Naval Shipyard, better known as the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There, during the peak of the Korean War,  he served for a year as an apprentice sheet metal worker. At night, he went to the School of Visual Arts (then known as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School), hoping for a career as a commercial artist or illustrator..

At 17, he entered the U.S. Navy as an enlisted man. During his service, he studied for, and received,  a high school equivalency diploma (the G.E.D). While stationed in Pensacola, Florida, he discovered in the base library the work of the great masters of 20th century American literature: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald,  John Dos Passos, T.S. Eliot and others. He began to write, while simultaneously shifting his ambitions from cartooning to painting. In the Navy, he also met, for the first time, men his own age who had been to a university. They all urged him to take advantage of one of the most splendid rewards for service in the Navy: the G.I. Bill of Rights.

And so he did. After his discharge in 1954, he worked days in the art department of  an advertising agency, attended Pratt Institute at night, and in 1956 went to Mexico, where he attended Mexico City College for a year. There his focus shifted from painting and the graphic arts to writing. On his return, he spent another year at Pratt, but continued writing poetry and short stories.

In 1960, his life changed forever. He wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Post, speaking about the editor’s new book. He received a reply that asked whether he had ever thought about becoming a newspaperman. He said yes, and on June 1, 1960, he was given a tryout on the Post. He worked as a reporter and rewriteman that summer and was hired permanently in the Fall.

A long career in journalism followed. He worked as a columnist for the Post, and the New York Daily News, Newsday, and the old Saturday Evening Post as a European correspondent based in Barcelona and Dublin. He would also work as a staff writer  for New York magazine and Esquire, and publish in most major magazines. He covered wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland, along  with many of the domestic disturbances of the 1960s. He wrote, too, about boxing, art, baseball and jazz. Eventually he would serve as editor-in-chief of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News. Some of his journalism is in two collections: “Irrational Ravings” (1969) and “Piecework” (1996) and in 1998 he published a book-length essay on journalism called “News Is A Verb”.

His other non-fiction books include “Tools As Art”, an essay with examples from the Hechinger Collection that  treated the theme of tools in art; “Diego Rivera”, a 1999 biography (with many illustrations)of the Mexican painter; “Why Sinatra Matters” (2003), a biographical essay about the singer-actor and his role in urban popular culture. Two of his non-fiction works are memoirs: “A Drinking Life” (1995) and “Downtown: My Manhattan” (2004) He has written introductions for new editions of work by such writers as Jack London, James T. Farrell, Damon Runyon and Pete Dexter. He is currently editing for Library of America a collection of the journalism of A.J. Liebling, to be published in the spring of 2008.

At the same time he is a fiction writer, publishing ten novels and two collections of short stories. The novels include “Snow in August” (1997) and “Forever” (2002), both of which appeared on the New York Times list of bestsellers. As noted, his tenth novel, “North River”, was published in June, 2007. His short stories can be found in “The Invisible City” (1980) and “Tokyo Sketches” (1992).Some of  his fiction has been translated into Japanese, German, Italian, Polish, Turkish, and Spanish.

Hamill is married to the Japanese writer Fukiko Aoki. They divide their time between New York City and Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Hamill is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

<< Back to Speakers