A longtime newspaper columnist and editor, Hamill is the only person who can claim to have been editor-in-chief of both the Daily News and the New York Post. A memoirist and novelist, his notable books of the last decade include 2004's Downtown: My Manhattan and 1997's A Drinking Life, an account of his struggle with alcoholism.

Hamill grew up in Park Slope with dreams of becoming a cartoon artist. He took night classes from the School of Visual Arts before enlisting in the army. Upon coming home in 1957, he began studying at Mexico City College and started working at the New York Post in 1960. The New York newspaper strike in the early ‘60s led him to Europe as a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, where he popped around various countries to interview various celebrities. He returned to New York in 1964 to cover the Democratic National Convention and settled back in with the Post. One of his most interesting assignments came when Hamill encouraged his longtime friend, Robert Kennedy, to run for President. Pete worked on and covered the campaign and was even one of the men to wrestle the gun away from Sirhan Sirhan after RFK's assassination. Over the years his work has appeared in the Village Voice, Newsday, New York, The New Yorker, and Esquire, and after serving as the Post's editor-in-chief, he briefly served as the Daily News', only to resign after eight months, a move that prompted a letter of protest signed by over a hundred of the paper's writers. Beyond his journalistic pursuits, he's published numerous books, including fiction like Snow in August and Tabloid City and non-fiction like his memoir A Drinking Life. [Image via Getty]