By day, he helped run an autism center he opened in a suburb of Paris. In the evening, he delighted audiences as a clown named Buffo. In between, he wrote novels.
Howard Buten, a college dropout from Detroit, juggled three extraordinary lives.
In one, he was a tender, clumsy and wordless red-nosed clown named Buffo. He sold out theaters around the world. Critics compared him to Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx.
In another, he volunteered as an aide with autistic children, went back to school to earn a doctorate in psychology, helped pioneer a therapy for autism and opened a treatment center.
He squeezed in a third life as a novelist. “Burt,” written in the voice of a disturbed 8-year-old boy, flopped in the United States but implausibly achieved “Catcher in the Rye” status in France, where it sold nearly a million copies and he became — to his amusement and slight chagrin — a cultural sensation.
“Howard Buten is a kind of walking poem,” the French writer and actor Claude Duneton wrote in his introduction to Mr. Buten’s autobiography, “Buffo” (2005). “Images emanate from him, producing a slow music, a concentric adagio like ripples on water.”
Mr. Buten died on Jan. 3 at an assisted living facility near his home in Plomodiern, France, a town in coastal Brittany. He was 74.
His partner and only immediate survivor, Jacqueline Huet, said the cause was a neurodegenerative disorder.