Paul Auster

Paul Auster

Paul Benjamin Auster was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker, born on February 3, 1947, in Newark, New Jersey, and died on April 30, 2024. He became one of the most familiar American literary figures of his generation, especially for readers drawn to fiction about chance, identity, memory, and the strange turns of ordinary life. His books were translated into more than 40 languages, and his career moved across novels, memoirs, essays, poetry, translation, screenwriting, and film direction.

Auster grew up in South Orange and Newark, New Jersey. His parents, Samuel Auster and Queenie Bogat, were middle-class, Jewish, and of Austrian descent. Their marriage was unhappy, and they divorced during Auster’s senior year of high school, after which he moved with his mother and sister to an apartment in Weequahic, Newark. He graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood, then studied at Columbia University, earning B.A. and M.A. degrees in English and Comparative Literature in 1970. As a child and teenager he was also a gifted athlete, especially as a baseball infielder, and attended summer camps in New Jersey and New York.

One event from those years stayed with him for the rest of his life. At 14, while at summer camp, Auster saw a boy standing only inches away from him struck by lightning and killed instantly. He later called it the “seminal experience” of his life and said he thought about it every day. That closeness to sudden death helps explain the force of accident in his work: the way a life can change because of timing, weather, a missed step, or a chance encounter.

After Columbia, Auster moved to Paris and tried to make a living translating French literature. He returned to the United States in 1974 and continued writing poems, essays, and translations of French writers, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert. His translation work led to The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, which he edited in 1982. That same year he published his first acclaimed work, the memoir The Invention of Solitude. He then reached a much wider readership with The New York Trilogy, published collectively in 1987.

The New York Trilogy is often cited as Auster’s best-known work for general readers. Though it nods to detective fiction, it is not built around conventional mystery solving. Instead, it turns the detective form toward questions of identity, space, language, and literature. Auster later said the trilogy grew directly out of The Invention of Solitude. Similar concerns continued in In the Country of Last Things (1987), Moon Palace (1989), and The Music of Chance (1990), books that helped expand his readership.

In the 1990s Auster wrote novels but also moved strongly into film, collaborating with Wayne Wang on Smoke, for which he won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay, and Blue in the Face. He directed Lulu on the Bridge in 1998. Later he returned with force to fiction and nonfiction, publishing novels, memoirs, an 800-page biography of Stephen Crane titled Burning Boy, and Bloodbath Nation, which he called a political pamphlet on gun violence in America. His 2017 novel 4 3 2 1 was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Auster’s words still hold readers because they treat life as both intimate and unstable, shaped by family, memory, intention, accident, and the many possible selves a person might become.