Buchwald, an owlish, cigar-chomping extrovert, zinged the high, mighty and humour-challenged. His column, syndicated to more than 550 newspapers at one point, won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982. He also published more than 30 books.

Last year didn’t start well for the writer. Kidney and vascular problems forced doctors to amputate one of his legs just below the knee in January, and Buchwald opted to not have dialysis. In February, he entered Washington Home and Community Hospices, which he described as “a place where you go when you want to go.” But by July, despite his physicians’ predictions, Buchwald left hospice. “Instead of going straight upstairs, I am going to Martha’s Vineyard,” he wrote. He finished his last book, Too Soon To Say Goodbye, there, and it was published in November.

Buchwald kept his sense of humour until he slipped into unconsciousness just before he died, said his longtime friend, Washington Post Vice President at-Large Benjamin C. Bradlee. “I just don’t want to die the same day Castro dies,” Buchwald told his friends, Bradlee said.

A statement from the family said Buchwald will be buried on Martha’s Vineyard in the Vineyard Haven Cemetery, where his wife Ann is buried. A memorial service is being planned in Washington, the family said.

Strategizing about how to land a big obituary became part of his repertoire of jokes, especially after news of the death of former Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet interrupted one of his book parties in New York. Death and dying became fodder for the column that he continued to write through 2006, mining the topic as regularly as politicians, scandals and news of the day.

Shortly after he entered hospice last February, he organized his last hurrah by calling up gossip columnists and radio talk show hosts to declare “I’m still alive!” His March 7 column began “I am writing this article from a hospice. But being in the hospice didn’t work out exactly the way I wanted it to. By all rights I should have finished my time here five or six weeks ago — at least that’s all Medicare would pay for.”

Buchwald reveled in the parade of famous visitors who came to see him and dealt publicly with more serious aspects of wrapping up one’s life. The existence of heaven and hell is possible, he decided, and if it provides comfort, people should believe in it. “I have no idea where I’m going but here’s the real question: What am I doing here in the first place?” In December, he told admirers at Wesley United Methodist Church in the District that he did not want to be remembered as dying after a long illness. “I want to die at 95 playing tennis against Agassi — because he couldn’t handle my serve,” he told the crowd.

Before death and dying presented itself as a topic for his columns, politics was a favourite jumping-off point. As a long-running observer of the nation’s political scene, Buchwald said his favourite president was Richard Nixon, whose delusions made for rich satirical material. “I worship the very quicksand he walks on,” Buchwald quipped. Most of his books were collections of his columns, which were syndicated by the Los Angeles Times and appeared in The Washington Post.

Two of his books Leaving Home (1993) and I’ll Always Have Paris! (1996) were memoirs. They told the story of his journey from a lonely, impoverished childhood lived largely in foster homes, to the salons of the famous. His entertaining, name-dropping memoirs — published in a period when some said his column was losing its edge — also won him new respect in the publishing world.

Although he had been elected in 1991 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he said in a 1996 interview that “people don’t take humorists seriously; they don’t even call them writers.” “It was those two books that made me a writer,” he said. “Now, I’m being reviewed seriously. That gives me great pleasure, because I want to be known as a writer, not a humorist. It’s one step up, and that’s the direction I want to be headed at this stage of my life.”

Buchwald also wrote about his bouts with mental disorders with a frankness that won him new fans around the country. He had been hospitalised for clinical depression in 1963 and for manic depression in 1987. Both episodes nearly drove him to suicide, he said; drugs and therapy were his salvation. He joked to friends that if he had a third bout of depression, “I will be inducted in the Bipolar Hall of Fame.”

After his subsequent appearances on television to talk about the chokehold these illnesses once had on his life, people would stop to thank him in airports and on the street for spreading a message of hope, he said.

His children, he said, were initially upset with his decision to turn down dialysis treatments last year, but he insisted that he preferred to control his last days, which lasted longer than even he expected. “I don’t know if this is true or not, but I think some people, not many, are starting to wonder why I’m still around,” he wrote while in the hospice. “In fact, a few are sending me get-well cards. These are the hard ones to answer”.

“So far things are going my way. I am known in the hospice as The Man Who Wouldn’t Die. How long they allow me to stay here is another problem. I don’t know where I’d go now, or if people would still want to see me if I weren’t in a hospice. But in case you’re wondering, I’m having a swell time — the best time of my life.”