A short life of the author
William Peter Hamill (24 June 1935 – 5 August 2020) was an American journalist, novelist, essayist, and editor who was the last of the great New York tabloid columnists — a writer who covered wars, riots, boxing matches, murders, political campaigns, and the daily life of the city with a passion, a moral seriousness, and a muscular prose style rooted in Hemingway, the streets of Brooklyn, and the belief that journalism at its best is a form of literature.
Life
Hamill was born in the Park Slope neighbourhood of Brooklyn, the eldest of seven children of Irish immigrants from Belfast. His father was a factory worker who lost a leg in an accident; his mother worked in a factory. The family was poor — “lace curtain Irish without the lace curtains,” as Hamill put it. He dropped out of high school at sixteen to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and later served in the Navy.
He attended Mexico City College on the GI Bill, studied painting at Pratt Institute, and began his journalism career at the New York Post in 1960. Over the next four decades, he became one of the most prominent newspaper columnists in America, writing for the Post, the New York Daily News (where he served as editor-in-chief), New York magazine, The Village Voice, and Esquire. He covered the Vietnam War, the Northern Ireland Troubles, the civil rights movement, and virtually every major New York story of his era.
His personal life was as vivid as his prose: he dated Jacqueline Kennedy, Linda Ronstadt, and Shirley MacLaine, drank prodigiously for decades, and was present at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Robert F. Kennedy was shot in 1968 — he helped wrestle the gun from Sirhan Sirhan.
A Drinking Life (1994)
Hamill’s finest work is his memoir of growing up in Brooklyn, discovering journalism, travelling the world, and drinking his way through it all. The book traces his relationship with alcohol from his first sip of beer as a boy through decades of heavy drinking — the bars, the hangovers, the blackouts, the relationships damaged — to his decision to stop drinking on New Year’s Eve 1972.
The memoir is not a recovery narrative in the conventional sense: Hamill did not go to AA, did not undergo treatment, and did not embrace a higher power. He simply stopped. The book’s power lies in its evocation of a lost New York — the Brooklyn of the 1940s and 1950s, the tabloid newsrooms of the 1960s, the bars where writers, politicians, and cops drank together — and in its honest, unsentimental account of what alcohol does to a talented man’s life.
Fiction
Hamill published several novels. Snow in August (1997) is a magical realist novel about a Brooklyn boy’s friendship with a Czech rabbi in 1947, involving the Golem of Prague. Forever (2003) is an ambitious novel about an Irish immigrant who is granted immortality and lives through 250 years of New York City history — from the Dutch colony through September 11, 2001. North River (2007) is a Depression-era novel set in Greenwich Village. The novels are uneven but always vividly rendered, and they reflect Hamill’s deep knowledge of and love for New York’s history and neighbourhoods.
Downtown (2004)
Hamill’s love letter to lower Manhattan — part history, part memoir, part walking tour — traces the neighbourhood’s evolution from the Dutch settlement through the present, drawing on his decades of reporting and personal experience. It is one of the best books about New York City.
Collecting Hamill
A Drinking Life (1994, Little, Brown) in first edition brings $20–$60. Forever (2003) brings $10–$30. Signed copies are readily available; Hamill was a generous signer at readings and bookshop events throughout his career.