Art Buchwald

One of the most celebrated newspaper humorists in American history spent a formative chapter of his childhood navigating the streets of Hollis, Queens. Art Buchwald would go on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist whose brilliant satirical wit reached millions of daily readers around the world, but the humor that made him a national treasure was forged early in life by hardship, loneliness, foster homes, and survival.

A Hard Start in Hollis

Arthur Buchwald was born on October 20, 1925, in Mount Vernon, New York, to an Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrant family. His early years were quickly upended by deep family adversity by a mother who suffered from paranoid delusions and was permanently hospitalized shortly after he was born— Buchwald perhaps unknowingly repeated that his mother died around the time of his birth — and a father, a curtain manufacturer who struggled desperately to keep the family solvent during the darkest years of the Great Depression. As a result, Buchwald and his sisters — Alice, Edith, and Doris — were placed into a succession of regional foster homes and children’s shelters (including the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York City and a boarding house in Queens for sick children (he had rickets) operated by Seventh-day Adventists) —a chaotic childhood environment he would later chronicle with breathtaking, painful honesty and signature humor

Hollis became the geographic backdrop where this complex childhood unfolded. He was placed in multiple foster homes within the neighborhood, where he learned how to observe human nature, read the micro-dynamics of a room, and employ laughter as a shield against vulnerability. In a landmark 1974 televised interview with James Day, he reflected openly on how these early foster experiences in Queens forced the rapid development of his comedic sensibilities, turning a survival mechanism into a historic literary career. Buchwald, his father, and his sisters were eventually reunited to live in Hollis.

The Saturday Evening Post Boy at the Hollis LIRR Station

One of the most vivid chapters of Buchwald's youth connects him directly to Hollis infrastructure. As a boy, he sold copies of The Saturday Evening Post to commuters, out-hustling older competitors.

According to the story he told later, a larger boy who also sold magazines at the station did not welcome the competition. Buchwald moved across the street and kept selling. Customers still came to him. It is a small story, but it contains much of the man he became: quick, stubborn, observant, bruised by life but not defeated by it.

From Paris to Washington

Arriving in Paris, Buchwald secured an editorial foothold at the Paris Herald Tribune, where he launched an iconic column blending expat observations, high-society parody, and sharp commentary. He started with "Paris After Dark," a restaurant and nightclub review, and later added "Mostly About People," which were eventually fused into "Europe's Lighter Side." In November 1952, he wrote a column explaining Thanksgiving to the French using garbled translations such as "Kilometres Deboutish" for Myles Standish — Buchwald considered it his favorite column and reprinted it every Thanksgiving for the rest of his life.

Upon his return to the United States, Buchwald anchored his operations in Washington, D.C. His humor was political, but it was rarely narrow. Art Buchwald's genius was his ability to use humor as a form of commentary. He saw his role as the court jester, pointing out the foibles of political leaders without malice. He wrote about presidents, bureaucrats, wars, scandals, celebrities, social habits, and the everyday foolishness of public life, making the powerful seem small and the absurd seem obvious. He could be pointed without sounding cruel. He made Washington seem ridiculous because, to him, much of public life really was ridiculous.

A National Treasure

In 1982, Art Buchwald received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. The award confirmed what millions of readers already knew: his humor was not merely entertainment. It was a form of commentary, a way of making sense of American life through irony, exaggeration, and comic truth.

Buchwald also wrote dozens of books over the course of his career. His essays, columns, memoirs, and public appearances made him one of the most recognizable humorists of his generation. Yet the pain behind the wit was never far away. He wrote and spoke openly about depression, abandonment, illness, aging, and death. His final years brought another wave of public attention when he faced kidney failure with the same mixture of candor and humor that had defined his career.