Laid Back in Washington

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.