Paul Auster

Author

• Born: February 3, 1947
• Place of Birth: Newark, New Jersey
• Died: April 30, 2024
• Place of Death: Brooklyn, New York

WRITER AND TRANSLATOR

Auster came to prominence in the mid-1980s as a novelist, and subsequently he worked as a poet, a screenwriter, an essayist, a memoirist, and a translator. He is noted for his genre-bending work.

AREA OF ACHIEVEMENT: Literature

Early Life

Paul Benjamin Auster was the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Poland. His parents were Samuel Auster, a radio engineer, who deserted the family in the early 1960s, and Queenie Auster. Born in Newark, Paul Auster was raised in South Orange, New Jersey.

Under the influence of such authors as Miguel de Cervantes, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and William Shakespeare, Auster began writing while still in his teens. He graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, just twenty miles from New York City. Auster attended Columbia University from 1965 to 1969, and after earning a bachelor’s degree, he remained for an additional year to obtain his master’s degree in comparative literature. In 1970, he toiled for six months as an ordinary seaman aboard an oil tanker in the Gulf of Mexico in order to earn enough money to live in France.

From 1970 to 1974, Auster lived and worked in Paris as an expatriate poet and translator of literature from French to English. He eventually translated the works of such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Stéphane Mallarmé, Joseph Joubert, and Maurice Blanchot. In 1974, after returning to New York City—where he published several volumes of poetry that received little notice—he married fellow writer and translator Lydia Davis and fathered a son, Daniel, born in 1977. Auster and Davis divorced in 1978. In the early 1980s, Auster’s father died, leaving his son an inheritance that enabled the fledgling author to work full-time at his craft for several years until he was able to support himself with the income from his writings. In 1981, he met Minnesota-born writer Siri Hustvedt at a poetry reading, and the two were married the following year; their daughter, Sophie, was born in 1987. Auster and his second wife settled in a Brooklyn brownstone apartment in the mid-1980s.

Life’s Work

In addition to translations—some of which appeared in the anthology The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (1982)—Auster’s early work included poems and nonfiction pieces (such as those later collected in the 1990 volume Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays, 1970–1979).

In 1982, he released a traditional sports mystery, Squeeze Play, under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin. That same year he published a memoir, The Invention of Solitude, part of which concerned his attempt to discover and understand the character of his late father. His research yielded a shocking piece of information: In Wisconsin, in 1919, his grandmother murdered her husband for infidelity and was acquitted for the killing. While neither of these full-length works was a commercial success, together they established several themes that would thereafter appear again and again in Auster’s fiction: crime, the quest for discovery, and the exploration of the nature of identity.

Auster first gained widespread critical recognition in the mid-1980s with the publication of a trio of short novels that exploded the conventions of traditional mystery stories. The Edgar Award-nominated City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986)—collected as The New York Trilogy in 1987—established the author as a consummate storyteller. These include deceptively simple, straightforward prose incorporating autobiographical details, symbols, literary allusions, linguistic games, plot reversals, and the blurring of appearance and reality to deal with larger, universal issues. The juxtaposition of Auster’s eminently readable, suspenseful writing style and his tangled, surreal, multilayered plots attracted both loyal readership and wildly divergent critical opinions of his work. Commentators applied such labels as “postmodern” and “metafiction” to his work, though the author in interviews vehemently insisted that his only intention was to provide entertainment.

In the 1980s, Auster started releasing a new full-length fictional work every few years; his sixteenth novel, Sunset Park, appeared in 2010. Though protagonists vary in gender (a woman narrates the post-apocalyptic In the Country of Last Things, 1987), in age (a boy with the ability to fly is the main character in Mr. Vertigo, 1994), and even in species (a dog tells the story in Timbuktu, 1999), Auster’s books are similar in theme. Coincidence and chance often propel the plot. Characters are typically loners, often occupied as writers or preoccupied with the writings of others. New York and its environs frequently serve as settings. There is an existential quality to most of Auster’s fictional work, since he usually explored the boundaries among the roles of author and character and reader.

Auster began expanding his repertoire into other creative outlets in the 1990s. He wrote the screenplays for such films as The Music of Chance (1993), Smoke (1995), and The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007), the last of which he also directed. He wrote additional memoirs, notably Hand to Mouth (1997), which details his years of living in Paris. In 2012 and 2013 he published companion memoirs: Winter Journal and Report from the Interior. In Winter Journal, discusses his life through the lens of his body, while Report from the Interior explores the maturation of his mind. He served as editor of National Public Radio’s National Story Project, True Tales of American Life (2001). He had even written the lyrics for several songs, and appeared in the 2009 documentary Act of God, about lightning strike survivors.

In 2017, Auster published the novel 4 3 2 1, an examination of four alternate versions of the youth of the protagonist, who resembled the author in terms of age and nativity. The novel, his first in seven years, was shortlisted for the UK's Man Booker Prize. That same year, he published a self-analysis of his oeuvre, A Life in Words. In it, he wrote, "I've always wanted to write what to me is beautiful, true, and good, but I'm also interested in inventing new ways to tell stories. I want to turn everything inside out."

Auster continued to publish his work in the early 2020s. His works of the period included two nonfiction books, 2021's Burning Boy: The Life of Stephen Crane and 2023's Bloodbath Nation, and his last novel, 2023's Baumgartner. By the end of his career, he had published a total of thirty-four books, including novels, memoirs and other autobiographical works. His publications also included essays, plays, poems, screenplays, and story collections.

Auster died in Brooklyn on April 30, 2024, at the age of seventy-seven, of lung cancer complications. He was survived by his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt; his daughter, Sophie Auster; sister, Janet Auster; and a grandson. He was predeceased by his son, Daniel Auster, who died in 2022 from a drug overdose after he was charged in the death of his baby daughter, Ruby.

Significance

Except for his Edgar Award nomination for City of Glass, Auster received relatively scant domestic recognition for his work during the first decade of his career. His early novels, which seldom sold more than twenty thousand copies in the United States, were often best sellers in France, where he received the Littérature Étrangère Prize in 1989 for The New York Trilogy.

In the early 1990s, however, Auster had gained considerable momentum. Each new work drew a significant favorable critical comment, and his readership consistently increased. He was considered one of America’s premier literary authors.

Auster garnered numerous honors for his work, including the 1990 Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Bodil and Independent Spirit awards for the screenplay of Smoke, and the 1996 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence. In 2006, he received the prestigious Prince of Asturias Award for literature, joining such previous internationally acclaimed recipients as Günter Grass, Arthur Miller, and Mario Vargas Llosa. In 2022, the New York Times' T Magazine listed The New York Trilogy as one of the twenty-five most significant New York City Novels from the last hundred years.

Bibliography

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2007. Print.

Auster, Paul. "Paul Auster, The Art of Fiction No. 178." Interview by Michael Wood. Paris Review. Paris Review, Fall 2003. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.

Barone, Dennis, ed. Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995. Print.

Bloom, Harold, and Amy Sickels, eds. Paul Auster. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Print.

Martin, Brendan. Paul Auster’s Postmodernity. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

Varvogli, Aliki. The World That Is the Book: Paul Auster’s Fiction. Liverpool, England: Liverpool UP, 2001. Print.

Williams, Alex. "Paul Auster, the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn, Dies at 77." The New York Times, 1 May 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/books/paul-auster-dead.html. Accessed 30 May 2024.