Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His books have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Early life

Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, son of Samuel Auster, a landlord who owned buildings with his brothers in Jersey City, and Queenie, née Bogat. His middle-class parents were Jewish, of Austrian descent; the marriage was an unhappy one, and they divorced during Auster's senior year of high school, he moving with his mother and sister to an apartment at Weequahic, Newark. An uncle was the translator Allen Mandelbaum. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, and Newark, and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood. During the summers of 1958 and 1959, Auster attended, respectively, Camp LakeView (East Brunswick, NJ) and Camp Pontiac (Copake, NY), where his outstanding athletic talents were recognized, especially as a baseball infielder. While attending summer camp, the 14-year-old Auster witnessed what he called the "seminal experience" of his life: a boy being struck by lightning and dying instantly. The boy was standing a few inches away from him at the time. This event changed his life, thinking about it every day.

Career

After graduating from Columbia University with B.A. and M.A. degrees (English, Comparative Literature) in 1970, he moved to Paris where, among other jobs, he tried to earn a living translating French literature. After returning to the United States in 1974, he continued to work on his poems, essays, and translations of French writers, such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert. His work as a translator led to the publication in 1982 of The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, which he edited. Following the appearance in 1982 of his acclaimed debut work, a memoir titled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected novellas published collectively as The New York Trilogy (1987), and is often cited as his most widely known work to the general reading public. Although The New York Trilogy gives a nod to the detective genre, they are not conventional detective stories organized around solving mysteries. Rather, Auster uses the detective form to address questions of identity, space, language, and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern form in the process. Auster disagrees with this analysis, because he believes that "the Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude". Similar to the themes explored in The New York Trilogy, the search for identity and personal meaning continued to permeate the three novels Auster published in quick succession in the late 1980s. Whether writing about the relationships between people caught in the flux of an uncertain future and uncertain identity (In the Country of Last Things [1987] and Moon Palace [1989]), or the role of coincidence and random events in our lives (The Music of Chance [1990]), Auster was steadily increasing his readership and popularity. During the 1990s Auster published three more novels, but he increasingly turned his attention to script writing and filmmaking by way of his screenplay and directorial collaborations with Wayne Wang on Smoke (which won Auster the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. He also directed the movie Lulu on the Bridge (1998). After a steadfast commitment to filmmaking during the late 1990s, Auster decided to turn his attention once again to writing novels, memoirs, and essays during the remaining two decades of his life. Between 2002 and 2024, Auster published nine novels, two memoirs, an 800-page biography of Stephen Crane (Burning Boy), and a sustained jeremiad (Auster calls it a "political pamphlet") on the long, unending history of gun violence in America (Bloodbath Nation). Eight of the final ten novels Auster published during his lifetime (from 1999 to 2023) received nominations for the International Dublin Award, and Auster's 2017 novel 4 3 2 1 was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Auster was on the PEN American Center board of trustees from 2004 to 2009 and its vice president from 2005 through 2007. In 2012, Auster said in an interview that he would not visit Turkey, in protest at its treatment of journalists. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan replied: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come, or not?" Auster responded: "According to the latest numbers gathered by International PEN, there are nearly one hundred writers imprisoned in Turkey, not to speak of independent publishers such as Ragıp Zarakolu, whose case is being closely watched by PEN Centers around the world." Auster was willing to give Iranian translators permission to write Persian versions of his works in exchange for a small fee; Iran does not recognize international copyright laws. One of Auster's later books, A Life in Words, was published in October 2017 by Seven Stories Press. It brought together two years of conversations with the Danish scholar I.B. Siegumfeldt about each of Auster's fiction and non-fiction works. It has been a primary source for understanding Auster's approach to his works.

Reception

"Over the past twenty-five years", wrote Michael Dirda in The New York Review of Books in 2008, "Paul Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature". Dirda extolled his virtues in The Washington Post, attesting that Auster had "perfected a limpid, confessional style" and constructed suspenseful, sometimes autobiographical plots. His heroes operated in a world that appeared familiar but they confronted "vague menace and possible hallucination." Writing about Auster's 2017 novel 4 3 2 1, Booklist critic Donna Seaman remarked that Auster went beyond conventions of storytelling and mixed genres, even crossing over into filmic modes. She praised the complex sense of wonder and gratitude in his works, which often features "sly humor" in an oeuvre which she considered "a grand experiment, not only in storytelling, but also in the endless nature-versus-nurture debate, the perpetual dance between inheritance and free will, intention and chance, dreams and fate. This elaborate investigation into the big what-if is also a mesmerizing dramatization of the multitude of clashing selves we each harbor within." The English critic James Wood criticized Auster for what he considered "borrowed language" and "bogus dialogue", nonetheless conceding that Auster was "probably America's best-known postmodern novelist". He noted: "One reads Auster's novels very fast, because they are lucidly written, because the grammar of the prose is the grammar of the most familiar realism (the kind that is, in fact, comfortingly artificial), and because the plots, full of sneaky turns and surprises and violent irruptions, have what the Times once called 'all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller'."

Personal life and death

Auster's first marriage was to the writer Lydia Davis in 1974. They had one child together, their son Daniel Auster. By 1979 they were separated and were divorced in 1981. In 1981, Auster married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, the daughter of professor and scholar Lloyd Hustvedt. They lived in Brooklyn and had one daughter, Sophie Auster, a singer. Daniel Auster was arrested on April 16, 2022, and charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month-old infant daughter Ruby, who consumed some of the heroin and fentanyl he was using. Ruby had died five months previously, on November 1, 2021. At the time of the arrest, police remained unclear about how the baby could have ingested the drugs while lying beside her father when he was napping. On April 26, 2022, Daniel Auster died from an overdose. Daniel Auster was also known for his association with the Club Kids and their ringleader Michael Alig, and was present during the killing of fellow Club Kid Andre Melendez. Paul Auster characterized his politics as "far to the left of the Democratic Party", but said he voted Democratic because he doubted a socialist candidate could win. He described right-wing Republicans as "jihadists", and the election of Donald Trump as "the most appalling thing I've seen in politics in my life". On March 11, 2023, Auster's wife Siri Hustvedt revealed on Instagram that he had been diagnosed with cancer in December 2022, and that he had been treated at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York since then. Paul Auster died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn, on April 30, 2024, at the age of 77. He was survived by his wife Siri Hustvedt, their daughter Sophie Auster, his sister Janet Auster, and a grandson.

Awards and honors

Published works

Fiction

Memoir

Nonfiction

Poetry

Screenplays

Edited collections

Translations

Miscellaneous

Other media