{"id":20110,"date":"2025-01-15T23:11:11","date_gmt":"2025-01-16T00:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=20110"},"modified":"2025-01-16T00:24:08","modified_gmt":"2025-01-16T00:24:08","slug":"howard-buten-autism-therapist-novelist-and-clown-is-dead-at-74","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=20110","title":{"rendered":"Howard Buten, Autism Therapist, Novelist and Clown, Is Dead at 74"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/p>\n

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Howard Buten, a college dropout from Detroit, juggled three extraordinary lives.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

He squeezed in a third life as a novelist. \u201cBurt,\u201d written in the voice of a disturbed 8-year-old boy, flopped in the United States but implausibly achieved \u201cCatcher in the Rye\u201d status in France, where it sold nearly a million copies and he became \u2014 to his amusement and slight chagrin \u2014 a cultural sensation.<\/p>\n

\u201cHoward Buten is a kind of walking poem,\u201d the French writer and actor Claude Duneton wrote in his introduction to Mr. Buten\u2019s autobiography, \u201cBuffo\u201d (2005). \u201cImages emanate from him, producing a slow music, a concentric adagio like ripples on water.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

His partner and only immediate survivor, Jacqueline Huet, said the cause was a neurodegenerative disorder.<\/p>\n

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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. \u201cBurt,\u201d written in the voice of a disturbed 8-year-old boy, flopped in the United States but implausibly achieved \u201cCatcher in the Rye\u201d status in France, where it sold nearly a million copies and he became \u2014 to his amusement and slight chagrin \u2014 a cultural sensation.\u201cHoward Buten is a kind of walking poem,\u201d the French writer and actor Claude Duneton wrote in his introduction to Mr. Buten\u2019s autobiography, \u201cBuffo\u201d (2005). \u201cImages emanate from him, producing a slow music, a concentric adagio like ripples on water.\u201dMr. 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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20112,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20113,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20110\/revisions\/20113"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}