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| photo: David Shankbone | |
Pete Hamill, the author and newspaper journalist, died yesterday. He was 85.
For more than 40 years, Hamill was a celebrated and award-winning reporter, columnist and the top editor of the New York Post and the Daily News; a foreign correspondent for the Post and the Saturday Evening Post; and a writer for New York Newsday, the Village Voice, Esquire and other publications.
The New York Times, one of the few New York City newspapers Hamill didn't work at, called Hamill "a quintessential New Yorker--savvy about its ways, empathetic with its masses and enthralled with its diversity--and wrote about it in a literature of journalism. Along with Jimmy Breslin, he popularized a spare, blunt style in columns of on-the-scene reporting in the authentic voice of the working classes: blustery, sardonic, often angry."
As an exampmle of his style, the Times quoted from a column Hamill wrote in the Post when riots erupted in Brooklyn in 1971: "If people say nothing can be done about Brownsville, they lie. If this country would stop its irrational nonsense and get to work, every Brownsville would be gone in five years. Get the hell out of Asia. Stop feeding dictators. Forget about airports, SSTs, Albany Malls, highways. This country can do anything. And if Brownsville stays the way it is for another year, someone sleek and fat and comfortable should go to jail."
Hamill also wrote more than 20 novels, more than 100 short stories, biographies, essays and screenplays. Among his works of fiction, the Times cited "The Gift (1973) and Snow in August (1997), both of which drew on his youth; Forever (2003), the story of a man granted immortality as long as he never leaves the island of Manhattan; North River (2007), a Depression-era tale of a man and his grandson; and Tabloid City (2011), a stop-the-presses murder yarn." His story collections were The Invisible City: A New York Sketchbook (1980) and Tokyo Sketches (1992).
His nonfiction included Irrational Ravings (1971), Piecework (1996), Why Sinatra Matters (1998), Diego Rivera (1999) and Downtown, My Manhattan (2004). "His memoir, A Drinking Life (1994), chronicled decades of alcoholism, ending on New Year's Eve 1972, when he took his last, a vodka and tonic," the Times noted.
At the time of his death, Hamill was working on a book about Brooklyn that was to be published by Little, Brown.
Born in Brooklyn, Hamill was a lifelong New Yorker, and the city and its people and stories suffused his work. "There's no one New York," Hamill said in 2007. "There's multiple New Yorks. Anybody who sits and says, 'I know New York' is from out of town."
Little, Brown publisher Bruce Nichols said: "There was no one Pete Hamill, there were multiple Pete Hamills. But every one of them was in love with New York, and the city and the country will never be the same without him."
In a tweet yesterday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wrote, "Pete was not just an unsurpassed journalist, editor and writer--he was the voice of New York. We say goodbye today to an irreplaceable New Yorker. I know that his legacy and work will live on."