I’ll Always Have Paris: A Memoir

The renowned humorist continues his best-selling memoirs, into the dazzling Paris of the late 1940s and the 1950s. Here we find twenty-two-year-old Art, in June 1948, one of the army of "fresh, peach-cheeked Americans" invading postwar France, and ready to embark on the greatest adventure of his life. Over the next fourteen years he would invent himself: a foster child from Queens suddenly hobnobbing with some of the most powerful and famous people in the world; landing a job with the legendary Paris Herald Tribune, with no legitimate experience whatsoever; and telling people where to go and what to eat mostly on the basis of his food-tasting experiences with the Marine Corps mess and the USC student union. He crashed costume balls in Venice, hunted bats in Sussex, ran with the bulls in Pamplona, clashed with police in Paris, spoofed Hemingway in the Congo, and dined with gangsters in Naples. From sidewalk cafes to society weddings, Buchwald reported on the folkways and foibles of the International Set, becoming everybody's favorite American in Paris - and one thing more. For in meeting and marrying a redhead named Ann, and then adopting three children, he also became what his foster childhood had never prepared him to be: a family man. This was perhaps his greatest invention of all.