Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Grau dies at 91
Columnist Hamill dead
NEW ORLEANS, Aug 6, (AP): Shirley Ann Grau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer whose stories and novels told of both the dark secrets and the beauty of the Deep South, has died. She was 91.
Grau died Monday in a New Orleans-area memory care facility of complications from a stroke, her daughter Nora McAlister of Metairie said Wednesday. She said the family is not planning a funeral or memorial service for her, in accordance with her mother’s wishes.
Grau won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for her fourth book, “The Keepers of the House.”
“I came home from kindergarten to a house full of reporters and I didn’t know what was going on,” McAlister recalled.
The book drew critical praise but also threatening phone calls for its depiction of a long romance between a wealthy white man and his black housekeeper in rural Alabama.
Grau said Ku Klux Klansmen, angry over the book amid the heat of the civil rights movement, tried to burn a cross on her yard in Metairie, a New Orleans suburb.
They apparently forgot to bring a shovel, and couldn’t drive the cross into the ground, so set it on fire flat on the lawn, she told The Associated Press in 2003. “It scorched a few feet of grass and it scared the neighbors, but I wasn’t even here. I was at Martha’s Vineyard. It all had kind of a Groucho Marx ending to it,” she said.
Her six novels and four short story collections were all set in the Deep South, from New Orleans to north Louisiana and Alabama.
McAlister said that as a young teenager she once wandered into the kitchen of their summer home on Martha’s Vineyard and found her mother chopping vegetables and talking – apparently to nobody.
Startled, McAlister asked what her mother was doing. Grau replied, “My characters are talking. I’m working out dialogue.”
Perfect
That “made perfect sense to me and I now understood what my mother was doing. She was working,” McAlister said.
Author Kurt Vonnegut came to lunch in Metairie and publisher Alfred Knopf Sr. came to dinner. Cocktail party guests at Martha’s Vineyard included New York Times sports writer Red Smith, painter Thomas Hart Benton and opera star Beverly Sills.
But she said conductor Guy Harrison was the guest who most impressed her mother, who loved music and “originally wanted to be a musician – a violinist.”
“She was amazed he was there in her home,” McAlister said.
Grau was born in New Orleans and grew up in Mobile, Alabama, the daughter of a physician. In the 2003 interview, she recalled that she was fascinated as a child with Greek and Latin, but also loved roaming the woods. Critics would later note in her fiction meticulous descriptions of flowers, plants and trees.
Grau attended a private high school in New Orleans, then Tulane University’s Newcomb College. She said she pondered careers as a classics professor or lawyer, but found sexism too pervasive in academia and the law.
She settled on writing instead, and her first book, “The Black Prince and Other Stories,” was published in 1954, when she was 26.
Critics often pointed to the short stories for praise, and the author said she agreed with the assessment.
Pete Hamill, the self-taught, street-wise newspaper columnist whose love affair with New York inspired a colorful and uniquely influential journalistic career and produced several books of fiction and nonfiction, died Wednesday morning. He was 85.
Hamill died at a Brooklyn hospital from heart and kidney failure, his brother Denis confirmed in an email.
“Pete was truly one of the good guys,” Denis Hamill said.
Crusading
Pete Hamill was one of the city’s last great crusading columnists and links to journalism’s days of chattering typewriters and smoked-filled banter, an Irish-American both tough and sentimental who related to the underdog and mingled with the elite. Well-read, well-rounded and very well connected, Hamill was at ease quoting poetry and Ernest Hemingway, dating Jacqueline Onassis.
His topics ranged from baseball, politics, murders, boxing and riots to wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Ireland. But he would always look back to the New York he grew up in, a pre-digital age best remembered through the dreamscape of black and white photography – a New York of egg creams and five-cent subway rides, stickball games and wide-brimmed hats, when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and there were more daily papers than you could count on one hand.
“I have the native son’s irrational love of the place,” Hamill wrote in his 2004 book, “Downtown: My Manhattan.” “New York is a city of daily irritations, occasional horrors, hourly tests of will and even courage, and huge dollops of pure beauty.”
A Brooklyn-born high school dropout, Hamill was a columnist for the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Newsday, the Village Voice, New York magazine and Esquire. He wrote screenplays, several novels and a bestselling memoir, “A Drinking Life.”
His 2003 novel, “Forever,” told the story of Cormac O’Connor, an Irish Jew who arrives in New York in 1740 and is granted eternal life as long as he stays on the island of Manhattan. His novels “Snow in August” and “The North River” also served up nostalgic and critically acclaimed tales of Old New York. His memoir covers his childhood in Brooklyn to the night he gave up drinking at a New Year’s Eve party in 1972.
Hamill had a brief and disheartening turn editing the New York Post. When financier Steven Hoffenberg
gained control of the tabloid in bankruptcy proceedings, he hired Hamill as editor in chief in 1993. Hamill quickly hired four Black reporters and promoted a number of women and minorities, recalled fellow columnist Jack Newfield in his memoir, “Somebody’s Gotta Tell It.”
But when Hoffenberg was unable to buy the paper, ownership fell to Abe Hirschfeld, who fired Hamill. The paper’s staff revolted, publishing a mutiny edition that kept Hamill’s name on the masthead as he supervised from a nearby diner. Hirschfeld rehired Hamill, giving him a kiss that the hardened newsman called “the single most ignominious moment of my life.”
Rupert Murdoch eventually purchased the paper, leading to Hamill’s dismissal. A few years later, Hamill spent a short stint as editor-in-chief of the Post’s archrival, the New York Daily News. He also worked for a few months in 1987 as editor of The Mexico City News.