Leaving Home: A Memoir

Art Buchwald

Jan 1994 · Phoenix Books, Incorporated · Narrated by Art Buchwald

About this audiobook

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 and in the company of strangers. Shortly after he was born, he and his mother were separated. He tells of a childhood that 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. It was an experience that forever molded him. How he negotiated the rocky path from an orphanage dining hall to the best table at Maxim's in Paris is a memorable story from a man who made America laugh for more than forty years.

About the author

Columnist Art Buchwald was born in Mt. Vernon, New York on October 20, 1925. At the age of 17, he dropped out of high school and joined the Marines. He served from October 1942 to October 1945 and then enrolled at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles to study liberal arts. In 1948, he left the university and traveled to Paris where he worked as a correspondent for Variety magazine and later as a columnist for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune. He returned to the United States in 1962, wrote more than 30 books, and had a column in The Washington Post, which dealt with political satire and commentary. He won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982, was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1986, and received the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He died of kidney failure on January 17, 2007.