Leaving home

Funny men don't necessarily have funny childhoods. Art Buchwald had to find his humor the hard way. In this poignant memoir, Buchwald writes with intimacy and candor about his early years - of a life constantly on the move, in the company of strangers. "Shortly after I was born, my mother was taken away from me or I was taken from my mother," he begins, as he tells of a childhood that took him from a Seventh-Day Adventist shelter to New York's Hebrew Orphan Asylum to a series of foster homes - all before the age of fifteen. It was an experience that forever molded him. "By the time I was six or seven, I said to myself, 'This is ridiculous. I think I'll become a humorist.'". To defend himself, Buchwald wove real-life adventures with fantasies and dreams worthy of Holden Caulfield, whom the columnist still insists worked one side of the street while he worked the other. Then, at seventeen, he ran away and joined the U.S. Marines, served in the Pacific, enrolled at the University of Southern California when the war ended (although he did not have a high school diploma), and finally wound up in Paris on the GI Bill. Exactly how he negotiated the rocky path from the dining hall at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum to the best table at Maxim's in Paris is a memorable story, told by a man who has made America laugh for forty years. Never have his skills as a storyteller been put to more affecting use than in the pages of Leaving Home.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.