BIO: Per Summer 1998 issue of "The World of Hibernia," successful journalist and author Pete Hamill (then 62) has a 1st generation connection to Ireland, his family's county of origin Antrim, his family names Hamill and Devlin. To that time, Hamill had written three novels and a memoir including "Snow in August" (1997), and "A Drinking Life" (1994). He has been an editor at different points in his career for "The New York Post" and "The New York Daily News." Although the famed Brrooklynite is considered by many to be the quintessential New Yorker, Hamill, the son of Belfast parents, is never far from his Irish heritage. :For an American also to identify himself as Irish is to embrace a link to an imagined past and the culture that is woven in that past," said Hamill. Visits to Ireland seem to have tapped what Hamill calls "his pagan template," an imagination that comes out when beckoned by "...certain kinds of music or the sight of Irish landscapes. Or while reading ! the magical tales of Irish mythology." A child of the Great Depression in the USA, Hamill is certain that seeing the country survive its toughest economic test fashioned his incurably optimistic outlook on life.