US political humorist Art Buchwald dies at 81

WASHINGTON, Jan 18 (Reuters) Pulitzer Prize-winning satirist Art Buchwald, who entered a hospice last year to die but survived to write a humorous, yet sobering, book about facing death, has died at age 81, his son said today.

Buchwald's six-decade career began with chronicling Parisian night life before he moved to the United States to lampoon US politics and culture from Washington.

''He died last night at 11:20 pm He was at my house,'' Joel Buchwald said. He said his father, who died of kidney failure, had lived with him for much of the past eight years.

Buchwald, whose leg had been amputated due to his health problems, decided not to continue dialysis last year and moved into a hospice expecting to die within a few weeks.

But as word got out, he received a stream of big-name visitors and old friends, reminisced about life and ended up writing a book about the experience, ''Too Soon to Say Goodbye,'' which was published in November and included eulogies that friends had planned to deliver at his expected funeral a year ago.

''The beauty of not dying but expecting to,'' he wrote, ''is that it gives you a chance to say goodbye to everybody.'' A newspaper humorist whose column was syndicated to more than 550 newspapers at one point, Buchwald won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982. He also published more than 30 books.

Buchwald worked in Washington for much of his life after launching his career in Paris and writing columns from there for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune during the 1950s.

He could find a touch of the absurd most anywhere -- but seemed to find his most fertile ground in the US capital.

''All I am concerned with is making fun of them. I have no intention of worrying about what is good for the country,'' Buchwald told Reuters in a 1987 interview while promoting his book ''I Think I Don't Remember.'' 45 BOOKS The title was from a column he did after President Ronald Reagan said he could not recall signing an executive order permitting the covert sale of US arms to Iran.

Buchwald said he couldn't recall whether the work was his 23rd or 24th book. He wrote some 45 in all, including ''I'll Always Have Paris'' (Putnam, 1995), ''Stella in Heaven: Almost a Novel'' (Putnam, 2000) and a collection of newspaper columns, ''Beating Around the Bush'' (Seven Stories, 2005).

Buchwald was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1986.

Most recently, Buchwald was the recipient of the 2006 Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, who called him ''patron saint of political satire for almost six decades.'' He and partner Alain Bernheim made headlines in 1988 when they sued Paramount Pictures for plagiarism, claiming the Hollywood studio stole their script idea for the Eddie Murphy movie ''Coming to America.'' They won and accepted a settlement from Paramount.

The foster son of a curtain manufacturer, Joseph Buchwald, the humorist grew up in the Queens borough of New York City. He never graduated high school and left home at 17 to join the Marines, serving with the Fourth Marine Air Wing in the Pacific Theater. He was discharged as a sergeant in 1945.

Buchwald enrolled at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles on the G.I. Bill, worked as managing editor of the campus magazine ''Wampus'' and wrote a column for the college newspaper, the Daily Trojan.

He left USC in 1948 without earning a degree and went to Paris, where he worked as a correspondent for Variety Magazine before being hired by the Herald Tribune.

Reuters LL RS2345