Art Buchwald, prize-winning columnist, 81

WASHINGTON - Art Buchwald, 81, the newspaper humor columnist for more than a half-century who found new comic material in the issues that come up at the end of life, died of kidney failure Wednesday at his son's home in Washington.

Mr. Buchwald, an owlish, cigar-chomping extrovert, zinged the high, mighty and humor-challenged. His column, syndicated to more than 550 newspapers at one point, won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982. He also published more than 30 books.

Last year did not start well for the writer. Kidney and vascular problems forced doctors to amputate one of his legs just below the knee in January, and Mr. Buchwald opted to not have dialysis. In February, he entered Washington Home and Community Hospices, which he described as "a place where you go when you want to go."

But by July, despite his physicians' predictions, he left hospice. "Instead of going straight upstairs," he wrote, "I am going to Martha's Vineyard."

There, he finished his last book, Too Soon to Say Goodbye, published in November. Mr. Buchwald kept his sense of humor until he slipped into unconsciousness just before he died, said longtime friend Benjamin C. Bradlee, the Washington Post vice president at-large.

A statement from the family said Mr. Buchwald would be buried on Martha's Vineyard in the Vineyard Haven Cemetery, where his wife, Ann McGarry Buchwald, who died in 1994, is buried. A memorial service is being planned in Washington, the family said.

Death and dying became fodder for the column Mr. Buchwald continued to write through 2006, mining the topic as regularly as politicians, scandals and news of the day.

Mr. Buchwald reveled in the parade of famous visitors who came to see him, and dealt publicly with more serious aspects of wrapping up one's life. The existence of heaven and hell is possible, he decided, and if it provides comfort, people should believe in it.

"I have no idea where I'm going," he said, "but here's the real question: What am I doing here in the first place?"

Before death and dying presented itself as a topic for his columns, politics was a favorite jumping-off point. As a long-running observer of the nation's political scene, Mr. Buchwald said his favorite president was Richard Nixon, whose delusions made for rich satirical material.

"I worship the very quicksand he walks on," he quipped.

Most of his books were collections of his syndicated columns. Two of his books, Leaving Home (1993) and I'll Always Have Paris! (1996), were memoirs. They told of his journey from a lonely, impoverished childhood lived largely in foster homes to the salons of the famous.

Mr. Buchwald wrote about his bouts with mental disorders with a frankness that won him new fans. He was hospitalized for clinical depression in 1963 and manic depression in 1987. Both episodes nearly drove him to suicide, he said; antidepressants and therapy were his salvation.

Mr. Buchwald was born with rickets in New York on Dec. 12, 1925, to a struggling, Austrian-born drape installer and a mother who suffered from chronic depression. Shortly after his birth, his mother was institutionalized. She lived 35 more years but never saw him again.

He lived first in a foundling home, then was sent to a Seventh-Day Adventist home for sick children. He stayed there until he was 5, with one of his three sisters. Their father, unable to support his children during the Depression, then placed them with the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in Manhattan.

In Leaving Home, Mr. Buchwald wrote that, at 6 or 7, he realized that he could deal with the loneliness and confusion of his life by becoming the class clown, and that he could draw laughs by making fun of the people in charge.

He lived in a series of foster homes, and he and his three sisters saw their father only on Sundays. When he reached age 17, Mr. Buchwald lied about his age and escaped into the Marine Corps. The Marines, he wrote, got "full credit for straightening me out." He served in the Pacific during World War II.

He attended the University of Southern California for three years, then dropped out after learning he could use the GI Bill to study in Paris. Once there, Mr. Buchwald conned his way into a glamorous, albeit low-paying, job as nightlife and entertainment columnist for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune. He knew nothing about haute cuisine, he later recalled, but got the job by claiming to have been a wine-taster in the Marines.

Mr. Buchwald's columns about Paris nightlife and jet-setting celebrities ran in New York under the name "Europe's Lighter Side." Ernest Hemingway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Gina Lollobrigida, Aristotle Onassis, Pablo Picasso, Elvis Presley, and uncrowned heads of international society made their way into his pieces, turning him into something of a celebrity expatriate himself.

After the Eisenhower era ended and the Kennedy administration was in full swing, Mr. Buchwald decided to return to the United States. He and his wife, whom he had met in Paris, moved to Washington in 1963 with their three children, adopted from orphanages and child welfare agencies in Europe.

After Paris, Washington turned out to be a city that had no soul, he later wrote, although it was a wonderful place to make a living off satire.

Survivors include his children, Joel, Connie Marks and Jennifer; five grandchildren; and two sisters.

Quotes from Art Buchwald and his writings:

ebb was.

very quicksand he walks on.

never light enough to make the team.

is impossible.

SOURCES: Tribune Media Services; Chicago Tribune; Associated Press; CNNEndText