Website review: The Journalist as Novelist of New Y...
Thamus discovered this in Journalism
•1 reviews since Mar 4, 2008
journalism
•online.wsj.com/article/SB120459199188109063.h...
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Thamus discovered 4 months ago- The journalist who became the novelist of New York Pete Hamill, a classic New York newspaper man, is writer in residence at New York University, a long way from gritty city desk journalism. He is the only person to have been editor of both the New York Daily News and the New York Post. In the past 40 years (he is now 72) he has also written 10 novels and two collections of short stories. But the focus of his now established literary life remains the same as in Hamill's newspaper career - New York City. Quote: His stories display the attention to detail and history that are the hallmarks of a seasoned reporter -like last year's North River, the tale of a middle-aged Irish doctor who unexpectedly finds himself raising his 3-year-old grandson during the Depression in Manhattan. "Unlike journalism, fiction is about people one at a time," Hamill says. "I've really been trying to get everything I know about New York into fiction." Mr. Hamill's most ambitious attempt was his last novel, Forever (2002), in which the main character gains immortality (as long as he remains on the island of Manhattan) and lives through 250 years here. Hamill has a fascination with immigration beyond his own family and his own Irish heritage, as his novels and his memoir, Downtown: My Manhattan, demonstrate. He writes about Italians and Jews, about Chinese families in his neighborhood and the the Meatpacking District that used to be full of immigrants from Spain. Quote: Looking at journalism today, Hamill doesn't think papers are going to vanish, but he doesn't feel that the business has "the same urgency to it." So is Hamill nostalgic for an older New York? He could do without the recent smoking ban. "It seemed too drastic, too much of a buttinski view." But he doesn't miss the gritty, crime-ridden 1970s: "I don't think 42nd Street was great when there were guys peddling heroin like Baby Ruth bars."
