Legendary New York journalist and author Pete Hamill has reportedly passed away in Brooklyn at the age of 85 after suffering a fall, according to The New York Times.
His brother, writer Denis Hamill, confirmed the news, revealing that Hamill fell in his home on Saturday after returning from receiving dialysis and was in intensive care at Methodist Hospital when “his kidneys and heart failed him.”
Hamill began working for the New York Post in 1960, and over the years, he also went on to serve as a columnist and editor at The Daily News. He wrote for New York Newsday, The Village Voice, Esquire, Rolling Stone and New York Magazine.
“The room was more exciting to me than any movie,” he wrote in his memoir, “an organized chaos of editors shouting from desks, copy boys dashing through doors into the composing room, men and women typing at big manual typewriters, telephones ringing, the wire service tickers clattering, everyone smoking and putting butts out on the floor.”
In addition to his journalistic work, Hamill penned dozens of novels, including the best-seller Forever, as well as his 1994 memoir A Drinking Life. In 1976, he won a Grammy Award for his liner notes on Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks album. He won a George Polk Career Award for his lifetime contributions in journalism in 2014.
“I’ve done the best I could to be the best Pete Hamill I ever could,” he told the Times in a 2016 interview.
RIP Pete Hamill, a walking inspiration to so many of us. He was the journalist we all wanted to be, with the life we all wanted to live. The best advice he ever gave me: “ALWAYS check the clips.” So basic yet somehow so often forgotten. His legacy and work live on.
— jimrutenberg (@jimrutenberg) August 5, 2020
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