I'll Always Have Paris: A Memoir by Art Buchwald

From the Publisher

"ART BUCHWALD DOES IT AGAIN. . . . A GREAT READ."
--Larry King, USA Today

In 1948, an American innocent named Art Buchwald set sail for Paris, France, determined to crash Hemingway's moveable feast and make himself famous. What's more, he did it.

Now he remembers those golden years--when he wrote for the Paris Herald Tribune, fell in love, spoofed Hemingway, dined with gangsters, and crashed costume balls in Venice. Everything that has made Buchwald one of the world's best-loved writers is in this funny, enchanting, poignant book.

"HONEST AND MOVING . . . A CONSUMMATE STORYTELLER."
--The New York Times Book Review

"ROLLICKING . . . The book gallops and gambols along. . . . Buchwald is a master of the anecdote."
--The Baltimore Sun

Publishers Weekly

Tired of eating leftover meat loaf in Queens, New York, Buchwald, a 22-year-old budding journalist in 1948, landed in Paris and talked his way into becoming restaurant and nightclub reviewer for the Paris bureau of the New York Herald Tribune. His celebrated "Paris After Dark" column, plus interview pieces, launched his career. Both irreverently funny and deeply touching, this golden memoir (a sequel to Leaving Home) gloriously recreates the adventurous, liberated spirit of expatriate Paris, as Buchwald hobnobs with Janet Flanner, E.B. White, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Thornton Wilder, and recalls brief encounters with Picasso, Hemingway, Orson Welles, Mike Todd, Audrey Hepburn, Roy Cohn. He also met and in 1952 married Ann McGarry, an Irish American couture apprentice from Pennsylvania, and they adopted three children as Buchwald overcame self-doubts engendered by his unstable foster-home childhood. The book's second half recalls trips to Rome, London, Moscow, Warsaw, Istanbul and his return to the U.S. in 1963, but this travelogue pales beside the Paris section, which magically makes the reader feel young and hopeful. 100,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour. (Sept.)

Library Journal

This book finds syndicated columnist Buchwald once again in a reminiscent mood. Picking up where Leaving Home (LJ 12/93) left off, it shows readers around the places, people, and events of Buchwald's Paris years as a member of the Herald Tribune staff during the 1940s and 1950s. Buchwald has had a long and interesting life; obviously gifted with an excellent memory, he is able to recall a great many anecdotes worth hearing. The particular qualities that marked the earlier volume are again conspicuousthe fluent narrative style, the swift economy of words, the judgments dropped lightly here and there. "The ghosts are everywhere," he writes, "the memories remain vivid, sometimes painful and exploding, making me want to cry." Among the most painful are his separation from his wife, Ann, after 40 years of marriage and her death in 1994. Readers will find much to detain them here. For all popular biography collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/96.]A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston

USA Today - Larry King

Art Buchwald does it again. A great read.

Kirkus Reviews

Raconteur Buchwald (Leaving Home, 1993, etc.) checks in with the second installment of his memoirs. It's full of lively anecdotes, and dropped names are as plentiful as autumn leaves in the Bois de Boulogne.

Picking up the narrative where Leaving Home left off, Buchwald blithely relates what happened after he landed, in 1948, what may have been the world's greatest postwar job: writing for the Herald Tribune in Paris. As an entertainment columnist and food critic for the paper, Buchwald got to know, close up, corporate bigwigs, politicians, showbiz luminaries, and other assorted stars of the International Set. While he was earning $25 a week, young Art hobnobbed with the likes of Truman Capote and Elvis Presley, Thornton Wilder and J. Paul Getty. He did a one-night stand as a waiter at Maxim's. He crashed fancy dress balls. He helped further Prince Rainier's courtship of Grace Kelly, and he mediated (with hilarious results) a dispute between the Greek magnates Onassis and Niarchos. He challenged Rex Harrison (who had taken umbrage at one of his columns) to a duel. (Harrison didn't show.) By dint of sincere application and a droll gift for puncturing pomposity wherever he found it, he rose to the position of bon vivant wonderfully. Even better, he found and married the redoubtable Ann, and they in turn adopted three children. Ultimately, though, the high life took its toll; there was a struggle with depression and a period of separation from Ann. On the whole, however, the memoir is about the fun and romance of a now vanished time. "All of my writing since," Buchwald notes, "has been the result of my landing that job on the Trib."

While this current installment is not as Dickensian as the widely praised Leaving Home, Buchwald's self-deprecating wit is in full display. Some stories are unabashedly sentimental; all are entertaining. Paris never looked better.

Product Details