Art Buchwald

Art Buchwald was one of America's premier satirical columnists from the 1950s through the 90s. After serving in the Marines during World War II, he enrolled at USC in Los Angeles on the GI bill and edited the campus paper, the Daily Trojan, but left the school when he realized he couldn't get a degree because he hadn't graduated from high school. Off to Paris he went, where he began writing for Variety and then the New York Herald Tribune.

Back in America, Buchwald worked mainly for the Washington Post. He wrote 41 books and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for "Outstanding Commentary." Upon his death in 2007, the New York Times posted a video obituary in which Buchwald said "Hi. I'm Art Buchwald and I just died."

Articles by this Author

I Was a Marine, May 2023 | Vol. 68, No. 3

Art Buchwald recalled how the Marine Corps tried to make a man out of him during World War II. Years later, he poignantly reunited with the drill instructor who had disciplined him day and night.

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Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

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