The journalist who matched grit with elegance

Pete Hamill 1935–2020

Pete Hamill was New York City’s tabloid poet. As a columnist for the New York Post and Daily News in an era when print newspapers thrived, the Brooklyn native filed thousands of dispatches chronicling life in the five boroughs, writing about crime, politics, sports, class, race, and the travails of average Joes. A high-school dropout who could quote Faulkner and Balzac, he had a flair for language that was both blunt and erudite. Hamill filed dispatches from the Vietnam War and the conflict in Northern Ireland, interviewed Che Guevara and Martin Luther King

Jr., and lived in San Juan, Rome, and Barcelona. He wrote novels, short stories, and a best-selling memoir, A Drinking Life. His most enduring subject, though, was his hometown. “New York,” he wrote in 2004, “is a city of daily irritations, occasional horrors, hourly tests of will and even courage, and huge dollops of pure beauty.”

The oldest of seven children born to Irish immigrants, Hamill grew up in a “crowded, $60-a-month apartment,” said the New York Daily News. His father worked at a grocery store and a munitions plant; his mother was a hospital midwife and movie-theater cashier. “Fascinated with comic books, he began drawing,” said The New York Times, and after a stint as a sheet-metal worker, a tour in the Navy, and a spell in art school, he spent three years as a graphic designer. “But his future remained cloudy” until he wrote a letter to the editor of the Post in 1960 asking for a tryout. Smitten by the clamor of the newsroom, he was offered a spot on the overnight desk, “chasing murders at two in the morning,” he later wrote.

When Hamill turned to magazine writing, his “articles for Esquire and New York magazine placed him at the vanguard of the New Journalism movement,” said The Washington Post. Hamill was a sometime news item himself, thanks to romances with Shirley MacLaine, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Linda Ronstadt. Slowed in later life by kidney disease and other ailments, Hamill returned to Brooklyn in 2016 after years in Manhattan, working on a final book about the borough and buying a cemetery plot near his boyhood home—close by the resting spot of the infamous New York political fixer Boss Tweed.

“If you’re going to spend an eternity,” he said, “better with a rogue than with a saint who would drive you into slumber.”