Eric Hammel

I was born in 1946, in Salem, Massachusetts, and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I graduated from Central High School of Philadelphia in January 1964 and earned a degree in Journalism from Temple University in 1972.My road to writing military history began at age 12, when I was stuck in bed for a week with a childhood illness. My father bought me the first paperback book I ever owned, Walter Lord’s Day of Infamy. As I devoured the book, I realized that I wanted to write books exactly like it — what we now call popular narrative history. Lord had pieced together the book from official records illuminated with the recollections of people who were there.I began to write my first military history book when I was 15. It eventually turned out to be Guadalcanal: Starvation Island. I completed the first draft before I graduated from high school. During my first year of college, I wrote the first draft of Munda Trail, and I got started on 76 Hours when I was a college junior. Then I got married and went to work, which left me no time to pursue my writing except as a journalism student. I quit school at the end of my junior year and went to work in advertising in 1970. I completed my journalism degree in 1972, moved to California in 1975, and finally got back to writing while I operated my own one-man ad agency and started on a family.76 Hours was published in 1980, and Chosin followed in 1982. At the end of 1983 I was offered enough of an advance to write The Root: The Marines in Beirut to take up writing books full time. The rest, as they say, is history. I eventually published under my own imprint, Pacifica Press, which morphed into Pacifica Military History.At some point in the late 1990s, I realized I had not written in five years, so I pretty much closed down the publishing operation, and pieced together a string of pictorial combat histories for Zenith Press. I "retired" in 2008 and took up writing as a full-time hobby. And here we are. Now I am publishing several new narratives under the Pacifica Military History imprint, reprinting all of my older books as print-on-demand trade paperbacks, and also converting my body of older works to digital format for sale under Amazon.com's Kindle program and other e-book programs. I also publish ebook editions of other people's new military history and military fiction at http://www.PacificaMilitary.com