Pete Hamill has lived the kind of life some author might latch onto down the road as a good blueprint for a script.
Born in Brooklyn in June, 1935, the eldest of seven first-generation Hamill kids with parents who immigrated from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Teenage sheet metal worker at the Brooklyn Navy Yards who earned his high school GED while serving in the military. Wide-eyed art and writing student at Mexico City College and then night school design student at Pratt Institute, taking advantage of the GI Bill of Rights.
Columnist for the New York Post, Daily News and Newsday who covered wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland.
Diligent producer of essays, articles and fiction who’s currently working on “the closing pages” for novel No. 11.
A full life, indeed.
Yet ask Pete Hamill to describe what he is, and he answers in one word.
Writer.
Hamill takes a 3 p.m. phone call two days before Thanksgiving for an afternoon phone interview from his home in Manhattan. There’s wisdom in his well-seasoned New Yorker voice as he talks about life.
He says he started working on his novel at 9:30 a.m. and needed to come up for air anyway. [Click for MORE]
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