Paul Auster

Paul Benjamin Auster (Newark, New Jersey, 1947 - New York, 2024) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter and film director. His books have been translated into more than forty languages, and he is best known for fiction that questions identity, chance and the act of writing itself.

Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Auster came to reading early, partly through the library of an uncle who was a translator. He studied literature at Columbia University and in 1967 moved to Paris, where he earned money translating French poetry, including Mallarmé. He tried to break into filmmaking there without success, and screenplays for silent films that were never shot later found their way into his fiction. He returned to the United States in 1974 and kept writing poems, essays and translations.

His first novel, Squeeze Play, came out in 1976 under the name Paul Benjamin and attracted little notice. Recognition arrived with the memoir The Invention of Solitude (1982) and with The New York Trilogy, three linked stories that borrow the shape of the detective novel to ask questions about identity and language. In the late 1980s he published In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace and The Music of Chance, books in which coincidence and chance shape the lives of the characters. His style looks plain but hides digressions, metafiction and stories within stories, and his narrators often share traits with the author himself.

In the 1990s he also turned to film, co-writing Smoke with Wayne Wang, and later directed Blue in the Face and Lulu on the Bridge. He then returned to the novel with The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies. In his final years he wrote Winter Journal, Man in the Dark, 4 3 2 1 and a biography of Stephen Crane, along with Bloodbath Nation, a protest against gun violence in America. He defended civil liberties and refused to visit countries without democratic laws. In 2006 he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature.

His legacy lies in making fiction a place for questions about chance and identity, written in a clear prose that conceals considerable formal complexity. He died at his home in Brooklyn on April 30, 2024, at the age of 77, of complications from lung cancer.