One of my old favorite writers:
Newspaper Columnist Art Buchwald Dies at 81
A columnist for more than a half-century, Buchwald found new comic material in the issues that come up at the end of life.
Listen to Art Buchwald clips at NPR
fishbowlDC – In Memoriam: Art Buchwald (1925-2007)
In a town that needs to laugh more — and needs people like Buchwald to point out how silly the whole circus can be at times — Buchwald will be sorely missed.
Art Buchwald, who for decades wrote a humor column in Paris and then in Washington, died at age 81.
Buchwald died of kidney failure Wednesday at his son’s home in Washington.
Buchwald mined for humor political corruption, cultural differences between Europe and the United States, and a range of other topics in a column that was first published in the International Herald Tribune and then in the Washington Post.
Most recently he chronicled his refusal last year to maintain his dependence on a dialysis machine.
He was moved into a hospice, and when he did not die, moved to Martha’s Vineyard, where he wrote “Too Soon to Die� and continued his column.
In one of his autobiographies, “Leaving Home,� Buchwald recalled how his father, a Jewish curtain installer impoverished by the Depression, deposited him and his three sisters at a Seventh-day Adventist orphanage after institutionalizing Buchwald’s mother for depression.
But the father pulled the kids out and sent them to a Jewish orphanage after hearing his son singing “Jesus Loves Me.�
BTW I’ve read Leaving Home and it’s excellent.
More from the Washington Post:
• Bench Conference: Living Legacy of Art Buchwald
• AUDIO: A December Interview With Buchwald
• Q&A Transcript: Former Post Editor Ben Bradlee
• Live Q&A, 3 p.m. ET: A Daughter Remembers