31 Facts About Pete Hamill

William Peter Hamill was an American journalist, novelist, essayist and editor.

The eldest of seven children of Catholic immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Pete Hamill was born in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

Billy Pete Hamill was introduced to Anne Devlin in 1933 and they married the following year.

Billy Pete Hamill had jobs as a grocery clerk, in a war plant, and later in a factory producing lighting fixtures.

Anne Pete Hamill was employed in Wanamaker's department store, and she worked as a domestic, a nurses' aide, and a cashier in the RKO movie chain.

In 1949, Pete Hamill attended the prestigious Regis High School in Manhattan, but he 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.

Pete Hamill attended night classes at the School of Visual Arts, with the goal of becoming a painter.

Pete Hamill took courses at Pratt Institute, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1980.

In 1958, while serving as the art director for a Greek-language newspaper the Atlantis, Pete Hamill talked his way into writing his first piece about his friend, Puerto Rican professional boxer Jose Torres, then a neophyte middleweight and Olympic champion.

Pete Hamill eventually attracted enough attention and was hired as a reporter for the New York Post in 1960.

Pete 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.

Pete Hamill began writing a column for the New York Post in late 1965, and, by the end of that year, was reporting from Vietnam.

Pete Hamill served briefly as editor of the Post, and later as editor-in-chief of the Daily News.

Pete Hamill wrote about wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland, and reported on America's urban riots of the 1960s.

Pete Hamill wrote about the New York underclass and racial division, most notably in an essay for Esquire magazine, "Breaking the Silence".

Pete Hamill 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.

Pete Hamill wrote fiction, producing ten novels and two collections of short stories.

Pete Hamill 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.

Pete Hamill published two volumes of short stories: The Invisible City: A New York Sketchbook and Tokyo Sketches.

Pete Hamill wrote about comic strips, of which he was a collector.

Pete Hamill contributed an introduction to Jerry Robinson: Ambassador of Comics.

Pete Hamill penned a handful of teleplays and screenplays, including adaptations of his own novels, and had a few minor film roles, usually playing a generic "reporter," or himself.

Pete Hamill appeared as a commentator in several documentaries, including Ric Burns' New York: A Documentary Film, and Ken Burns' Prohibition.

Pete Hamill appeared as a speaker in the 2018,4-part Netflix documentary titled Bobby Kennedy for President.

Pete Hamill played himself in the 1991 film The King of New York, directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Christopher Walken.

Pete Hamill's work meant that he resided for long periods of time in Spain, Ireland, Saigon, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Rome, Los Angeles, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Pete Hamill subsequently worked for Kennedy's campaign and covered it as a journalist.

Pete Hamill was one of four men who disarmed Sirhan Sirhan of his gun in the immediate aftermath of the senator's assassination.

Pete Hamill was 85, and suffered from heart and kidney failure at the time of his death, in addition to having fractured his right hip in a fall.

Pete Hamill received the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists in 2005.

In 2010 Pete Hamill received an Honorary Doctor of Letters Degree from St John's University.