Showing results by author "Art Buchwald" in All Categories

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Art Buchwald wrote over 30 books, including his two-part memoir, the best-selling Leaving Home, and I'll Always Have Paris. In 1986, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Everybody's favorite "American in Paris". Art Buchwald began his young career at the age of 22 in 1948 by covering sidewalk cafes and weddings for the legendary Paris Herald Tribune. For the next 14 years he developed a life and career socializing and reporting on the folkways and foibles of some of the most powerful and famous people in the world. More importantly, though, he met and married a redhead named Ann, adopted three children, and created a home for his new family, something new to him as a Jewish foster-child from Queens.

Funny men don't necessarily have funny childhoods. Art Buchwald had to find his humor the hard way. In this poignant memoir, Buchwald writes with intimacy and candor about his early years—of a life constantly on the move, in the company of strangers. "Shortly after I was born, my mother was taken away from me or I was taken from my mother,' he begins, as he tells of a childhood which took him from a Seventh-Day Adventist shelter to new York's Hebrew Orphan Asylum to a series of foster homes—all before the age of fifteen.

Roger Folger, age 61, recently lost his wife, Stella, but her spirit hasn't wandered far. In an all-too-earthly way, Roger converses with her disembodied voice in the privacy of the home they shared for many years, and you can bet Stella talks back. Roger fills her in on the latest about their kids and neighbors, while she tells Roger what heaven's like—picture the Ritz-Carlton in Florida, managed by Saint Peter. Worried that Roger is lonely, Stella decides that he needs a new woman in his life. But once he begins to date, Stella grows jealous.