Here's a Boston GLOBE obit for him, well-written, imo:

by Bryan Marquard, Globe Staff

"With wit that never lost its edge, Art Buchwald used his newspaper column to skewer politicians in the nation's capital and over the decades millions of Americans began their morning by reading his unfolding chronicle of history, writ small and satirical. At the end of his life ill health gave him a new subject, his own death, and he wrote his own epitaph in a series of poignant dispatches from a hospice center that he left after outliving his stay.

Mr. Buchwald, who had entered hospice care a year ago when his kidneys failed, died in his Washington, D.C., home Wednesday evening, according to his son, Joel. He was 81 and had published a book last year, "Too Soon to Say Goodbye," that celebrated the unexpected coda in his long life of achievement.

"The purpose of the hospice is to help you pass away gently when all else fails," he wrote. "You are supposed to do it with as little pain as possible and with dignity. It didn't work out that way for me."

After a year-long respite that his son described as "a hell of a victory lap," Mr. Buchwald began receiving hospice care at home 12 days ago. "He died comfortably with his family at his bedside," the family said in a statement.

Mr. Buchwald, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982, had lived in Washington nearly 45 years, dividing his time between the capital and a second home on Martha's Vineyard for the past 35 years.

"There was no better way to start the day than to open the morning paper to Art's column, laugh out loud and learn all over again to take the issues seriously in the world of politics, but not take yourself too seriously," US Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement.

In columns written after entering hospice care, Mr. Buchwald confronted the topic of dying, though with a hint of the puckish observations readers have come to expect when reading a column accompanied by a photo of Mr. Buchwald with his lopsided grin and horn-rimmed glasses.

"By the way, people always talk about heaven as the place where we are all going," he wrote last March. "The problem with thinking about heaven is that you then have to think about hell. The irony of our culture is people are constantly telling other people to go to hell, but no one tells them to go to heaven."

During the weeks after Mr. Buchwald entered the hospice, his room became a place where laughter -- usually his own -- often rang out as his bedside became a mandatory stop-over for the bold-faced name set. A headline for a New York Times report on his hospice room declared, "Washington's Hottest Salon Is a Deathbed."

Instead of dying, his health improved and he left the hospice on July 1.

"The whole point is I didn't expect to be here," he told the Globe in an interview last July at his gray-shingled house on Main Street in Vineyard Haven. "My plan was to leave the earth. And then I thought, to hell with it, I'll go to the Vineyard."

Though he was known for the humor he culled from politics, many younger fans might be surprised to learn that Mr. Buchwald cut his teeth in his 20s writing about restaurants and nightlife for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune. He expanded into writing about celebrities, and the column was first syndicated as "Art Buchwald in Paris."

Against the advice of friends who thought it would be difficult to repeat his Paris success, Mr. Buchwald relinquished his status as arguably the most famous American in the City of Lights and relocated to Washington in the early 1960s. The move made him even more successful. At its height, his column was syndicated to hundreds of newspapers and many of the more than two dozen collections he published were bestsellers.

As a political humorist, he employed a style and an approach that were deceptive in their simplicity. He would tear an article from a newspaper, tuck it in a pocket, and mull the topic -- sometimes for days -- before quickly pounding out a column in unadorned prose that, often as not, turned the topic of the day on its head.

"I can now reliably report that Vice President Spiro Agnew has no intention of dumping Richard Nixon," he wrote in 1971 as Nixon prepared for his re-election campaign. "A spokesman for the Vice President told me that Agnew was very satisfied with the job his President was doing and that he even intended to give him more responsibilities than any Vice President has ever given his President before."

"Mr. Buchwald and his wife and children first started going to Martha's Vineyard in 1971, to escape the summer heat in Washington. A few years later a friend, the playwright Lillian Hellman, tipped off the Buchwalds that a 1888 house on Main Street in Vineyard Haven was for sale and they bought it.

"Along with using the island as a vacation retreat, Mr. Buchwald served for many years as master of ceremonies and auctioneer at an annual fund-raiser to benefit a consortium of social service agencies.

"I don't know how it happened, but I've become the Jerry Lewis of Martha's Vineyard," he told the Globe in 1996.

"In hospice care, Mr. Buchwald retained his sense of humor and took pleasure in being able to eat whatever he wanted after deciding to forego dialysis treatment, which would have prolonged his life, often having McDonald's meals brought in.

"What's beautiful about death is you can say anything you want to, as long as you don't lord it over others that you know something they don't," he wrote in his March 14 column. "The thing that is very important, and why I'm writing this, is that whether they like it or not, everyone is going to go. The big question we still have to ask is not where we're going, but what were we doing here in the first place?"

"In addition to his son, who lives in Washington, Mr. Buchwald leaves two daughters Jennifer of Roxbury and Connie Buchwald Marks of Culpeper, Va.; two sisters Edith Jaffe of Bellevue, Wash., and Doris Kahme of Delray Beach, Fla., and Monroe Township, N.J.; and five grandchildren.

"A family spokeswoman said Mr. Buchwald will be buried in the Vineyard Haven Cemetery in Martha's Vineyard, Mass., where his wife Ann is buried."