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.”

... contd.