Art Buchwald

American Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, columnist, raconteur and bon vivant. Looking like a genial bulldog dressed in a brightly-colored sports jacket and slacks and puffing a cigar, he begins an anecdote. His eyes light up, his face crinkles and he transforms into an impish boy hoping the world will like him.

He survived a painful childhood, as his mom went into a mental institution when he was three months old. Raised in the Hebrew Orphanage in New York, he saw his dad once a week, and he was shifted into six successive foster homes. One of the dysfunctional families he spent time with told such horrid stories of demons that he had nightmares for years afterwards. He told of losing his virginity at 15 to a hotel chambermaid. When he ran away to join the military in 1942 to see action in the South Pacific, he thought that the Marines were the best foster family he'd ever had. After university, he moved to Paris in 1948 where he joined the Herald Tribune for which he wrote a regular column, "Paris After Dark."

Subject to bouts of deep depression, he periodically plunged into suicidal darkness. He spent a month in a hospital in 1963 and again in 1987, during which time he continued writing. His book, "Leaving Home," was a best-selling memoir of his traumatic childhood, identifying the depths of his crippling depression. Going public about his illness in 1994, he offered hope to the some 17.5 million adult Americans who suffer from the agony of clinical depression. Buchwald turned his pain into humor with the creation of political word cartoons and syndicated humor columns that were printed in 510 newspapers. Humor was his salvation, the antidote to the misery of his youth. By 1981 he had written 24 books, including three memoirs. The first, "Leaving Home," speaks of his childhood, his three-year hitch as a WW II Marine in the Pacific and three years at USC.