Columnist and novelist Art Buchwald, 80, is in a Washington area hospice with an amputated leg, an assistant said Thursday.
Cathy Crary asked that the hospice not be named, saying, "We don't want him swamped."
The amputation, below the knee, was caused by a vascular condition; the leg wasn't getting enough blood, she explained. She added that it was not connected with a kidney problem, which was less severe than expected, and that Buchwald was not undergoing dialysis.
"He's really doing very well," she said.
Buchwald's column, which began in the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune in 1949, is not running currently. He won a Pulitzer prize for commentary in 1982 and his 80th birthday was celebrated last fall at the French Embassy in Washington.