He returned in 1964, worked briefly for the New York Herald-Tribune, and returned to the New York Post with his own column in 1965. When the city’s daily papers went on strike in 1963, Hamill was taken on by the weekly Saturday Evening Post magazine, for whom he spent a year in Europe, based in Barcelona and then Dublin. Meanwhile he was writing letters for publication to the New York Post after one flattering missive to the editor James Wechsler in 1960 he was offered a try-out as a reporter – and was hired. When he returned to New York he worked as art director of the weekly Greek paper Atlantis, for which he wrote his first story (translated into Greek), a profile of the future world champion light-heavyweight boxer José Torres.

In 1952 he joined the US navy, and when he was discharged he used the GI Bill to study at the English-language Mexico City College (now University of the Americas) in Mexico. But he decided to become a comic book artist, inspired by Milton Caniff’s newspaper strips, and so at 15 dropped out to take courses at the Pratt Institute and the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (under the Batman artist Jerry Robinson) while supporting himself as a shipyard worker at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Billy had lost a leg playing football in a Brooklyn park he did various factory jobs when he could find them, while Anne did the same while raising the family.Īt 14 Hamill was admitted to the private Regis high school in Manhattan, founded to provide Jesuit education to poorer Catholic boys. His father, Billy, and mother, Anne (nee Devlin), were immigrants from Belfast who had met in the US. Hamill was born the eldest of seven children in the then-working class Park Slope neighbourhood of Brooklyn. As he wrote in A Drinking Life, “Maybe words, like potions, were also capable of magic.” His later novels included Forever (2003), about a man granted eternal life provided he never leaves Manhattan, and Tabloid City (2011), a newspaper-thriller set in New York. A collection of short stories, The Invisible City: A New York Sketchbook, was published in 1980, and in 1994 came his most celebrated book, A Drinking Life, which he claimed inspired Frank McCourt to write Angela’s Ashes.

Forever by pete hamill summary