"I am not certain how Pop found the Hebrew Orphan Q1. ," Buchwald recalled in his Q2. memoir Leaving Home (1993). "Gaining admission was harder than getting into Princeton." In school, he was remembered as a nonstop Q3. . By the time he was 16, his father had saved enough money to reunite the family in an apartment, but he was an indifferent student and did not graduate. At 17 he ran away to join the Marines, and because he was underage, Buchwald is reported to have enlisted a drunk who, for a Q4. of whiskey, agreed to pose as his father to provide the required parental consent.

Discharged in 1945 with the rank of sergeant, Buchwald enrolled at the University of Southern California to take liberal arts courses under the G. I. Bill. When the university discovered that he did not have a high school diploma, he became ineligible for a degree. Next, he went to Paris to study French, also on the G. I. Bill. But he skipped classes and lived a Q5. life in Montparnasse. To supplement his income, he became a stringer for Variety magazine, and within three months had Q6. his way into the Paris edition of The New York Herald Tribune. His column of offbeat information on Paris caught on swiftly, and by 1951 he was writing a second column. A year later, the two columns were combined and began running in the US as "Europe's Lighter Side" and then "Art Buchwald in Paris".

After a three-year courtship Buchwald married Ann McGarry, and they adopted three children in Europe - Joel, who is Irish, Connie, who is Spanish, and Jennifer, who is French. Ann, an author and former literary agent, died in 1994, at 74. The couple had separated after 40 years of marriage but Q7. when she was dying of lung cancer. In 1957, Buchwald placed a classified advertisement in The Times of London: "Would like to hear from people who dislike Americans and their reasons why." He got two columns out of the replies.

In 1962 he returned to the US to settle in Washington and poke fun at American political and social life. His Q8. observations soon became so popular that he hit the lecture circuit, commanding up to $US3000 per speech (in the 1960s), delivered in a booming voice. In 1970, a play Buchwald had written called Sheep on the Runway, about American foreign policy, ran for three months on Broadway. In 1982, he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He also Q9. in screenwriting, which landed him in a four-year, $US2.5 million courtroom battle against Paramount Pictures in the early 1990s. Buchwald maintained that the 1988 hit movie Coming to America, had come from an idea he had submitted. A judge ruled in his favour and he received $US825,000 in the settlement.
In the late 1990s, after more than 8000 columns and 37 years of Q10. observations from Washington, Buchwald sought fresh perspective and moved into New York's Regency Hotel, and later the Wyndham. In 2000, he suffered a serious stroke, but rebounded enough to enjoy the release of another book. "People ask what I am really trying to do with humor," Buchwald wrote in Leaving Home. "The answer is, 'I'm getting even'." Buchwald is survived by his son and two daughters, five grandchildren and two sisters.