Leaving Home
Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Buchwald here delivers a bright, funny and poignant memoir of his early years, from a lonely childhood in Queens, New York City, to his start as a Herald-Tribune columnist in postwar Paris. He never saw his Hungarian-born, mentally ill mother, who was institutionalized shortly after his birth in 1925. His father, a Yiddish-speaking Austrian immigrant, a drape hanger, was a devoted parent, but was forced to place the author and his sisters in foster homes. It was a life with "no hugging," but Buchwald survived through humor born of much anger and sadness ("This stinks. I'm going to become a humorist," he told himself), eventually fleeing to join the Marine Corps in 1942. His later years would be "a lifelong search" for a surrogate mother and included two suicidal depressions. We see the development of a young writer in a book rich in incidents and rendered in wonderfully vivid scenes: Buchwald rollerskating down Queens Boulevard, losing his virginity to a hotel chambermaid, pulling burial detail as a Marine in the Marshall Islands, aspiring to screenwriting at the University of Southern California, where he studied on the G.I. Bill, and finally sipping Pernod in Hemingway-heady Parisian cafes on the eve of the 1950s. "I am new at writing memoirs," declares the author of this mature, immensely appealing look back at a youth of "luck and chutzpah." He is very good at it, too.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.