Art Buchwald Biography Quotes 14 Report mistakes

Early Life
Arthur (Art) Buchwald was born on October 20, 1925, in New York City, the youngest child of Jewish immigrants. His mother was hospitalized for long stretches when he was small, and his father struggled to keep the family together during the Depression. Buchwald spent parts of his childhood in foster homes and in an orphanage, experiences he later credited with sharpening both his independence and his eye for absurdity. He discovered early that humor could defuse tension and win attention, a lesson that would become a professional calling.

Wartime Service and Education
At 17 he left high school and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II, serving in the Pacific. The military gave him structure and a wider world to observe, and after his discharge he used the G.I. Bill to attend the University of Southern California. He wrote for campus publications and learned newsroom craft, but lack of a formal high school diploma complicated his academic path and he left USC without a degree. The experience nonetheless placed him firmly on a journalist's track.

Paris and the International Herald Tribune
Seeking a larger canvas, Buchwald moved to Paris in 1949. He talked his way into the International Herald Tribune, beginning with a nightlife column, "Paris After Dark", before expanding to a humor-and-observation feature that captured the rhythms of postwar Europe. His annual Thanksgiving piece explaining the American holiday to the French became a classic, reprinted for decades. He lampooned diplomats, tourists, and himself in equal measure, and his light touch made him a fixture of expatriate life. In Paris he married Ann McGarry, whose steadiness and wit matched his own; together they later adopted three children. The Paris years gave him a stage, a family, and a durable voice.

Washington and National Syndication
Buchwald returned to the United States in the early 1960s and settled in Washington, D.C., where his column found a permanent home and national syndication. His pieces ran in The Washington Post and were distributed widely, making him one of the most read humor columnists in the country. In Washington he wrote about presidents, press secretaries, cabinet officials, and the lobbyists who swirled around them, reducing Washington ritual to its human scale. He targeted pomposity rather than ideology and made politicians from John F. Kennedy through Ronald Reagan and beyond the protagonists of his weekly sketches. Within the Post's orbit he worked alongside figures who shaped modern American journalism, including publisher Katharine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee, and he shared a newsroom culture with the editorial cartoonist Herblock. Their standards of toughness and fairness informed his satire, even when he disguised sharp critique as a punch line.

Voice, Themes, and Influence
Buchwald's hallmark was a conversational voice that drew readers inside the joke. He preferred deadpan setups, improbable premises, and punch lines that revealed moral common sense. He aimed at official language and bureaucratic habits, translating policy into personal terms. The technique made complex issues, war appropriations, tax policy, diplomatic gaffes, accessible without trivializing them. He could be sentimental when writing about family or the holidays, and he returned often to the theme of American optimism, scrutinizing it with affection and suspicion in turns. His columns helped create a popular genre of political humor that coexisted with hard news in the daily paper, and he influenced generations of columnists who saw satire as a civic instrument rather than a mere entertainment.

Recognition and Awards
By the early 1980s Buchwald's byline appeared in hundreds of newspapers. He received numerous honors, most notably the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, cited for witty and insightful columns that broadened public debate. The prize affirmed what readers already knew: he had become, without abandoning humor, a serious commentator on the American condition.

Legal Battle with Hollywood
Away from the op-ed page, Buchwald became a central figure in a landmark entertainment case. With producer Alain Bernheim, he developed a treatment that Paramount Pictures optioned; years later the Eddie Murphy film "Coming to America" appeared, and Buchwald and Bernheim argued that the studio had used their idea without proper compensation. In 1990 a California court ruled against Paramount on breach-of-contract grounds, and a settlement followed. The case, Buchwald v. Paramount, exposed the workings of "Hollywood accounting" to public scrutiny and made him an unlikely champion of writers' rights.

Personal Life and Community
Buchwald's home base was Washington, but he also spent long stretches on Martha's Vineyard, where a circle of journalists, novelists, and broadcasters gathered in the summers. Ann Buchwald was central to his life and work, an editor at the kitchen table, a partner at diplomatic receptions, and a steadying presence through the mood swings he later discussed openly. Their household expanded through adoption, and family references, sometimes gently disguised to protect privacy, peppered his columns. In the newsroom and on the Vineyard he cultivated friendships that crossed professional and political lines, preferring argument followed by dinner to permanent enmity.

Health, Adversity, and Late Work
Buchwald lived openly with depression and periods of mania, experiences that deepened rather than darkened his writing. Later in life he faced serious physical illness, including vascular disease that led to the amputation of a leg and chronic kidney problems. In 2006 he declined dialysis and entered hospice, expecting the end. Instead he rallied, joked that he had flunked hospice, and wrote a spare, unsentimental book about the experience, "Too Soon to Say Goodbye". The late memoir joined earlier autobiographical works in which he revisited his childhood in care, his wartime years, and the apprenticeship in Paris that made him. Illness crystalized his themes: gratitude as a daily practice, humor as a kind of courage, and satire as a shield for the vulnerable as well as a prod to the powerful.

Death and Legacy
Art Buchwald died on January 17, 2007, in Washington, D.C., at age 81. Tributes from colleagues and readers emphasized his consistency: a column that arrived like clockwork, a voice that treated attention as a responsibility, and punch lines that outlived the news cycle. Those who worked with him, editors, publishers such as Katharine Graham, and fellow commentators, described a professional who never confused access with allegiance. For the public he left a trove of columns that remain instructive as well as entertaining, and a model of how to puncture self-importance without contempt for the people behind it. His Thanksgiving column still circulates each year, a reminder that civic rituals can be illuminated by humor. In the American press, where comedy and commentary blend uneasily, he proved that laughter could be an ethical stance, and he did it long enough and well enough to become a national habit.

Our collection contains 14 quotes who is written by Art, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Dark Humor - Live in the Moment - Romantic - Birthday.

Other people realated to Art: Russell Baker (Journalist), Waverley Lewis Root (Journalist)