Hunter began working as a copy editor at the Baltimore Sun in 1971 and became its film critic in 1982. He joined the Washington Post as its movie critic in 1997 and won the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award for the criticism in 1998. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2003 and took a buyout from the Post in 2008. He published The Master Sniper, the first of his 24 novels, in 1980. He also has published three nonfiction volumes: Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem; Now Playing at the Valencia: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Essays on Movies; and American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman and the Shoot-out that Stopped It.