Paul Auster

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. Auster 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, causing him to think 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.

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". Wood 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, to writer Lydia Davis, lasted from 1974 until their separation in 1979; they divorced in 1981. Their only child, Daniel, was charged in April 2022 with second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide following the fentanyl and heroin overdose death of his 10-month-old daughter. He died later that month of an accidental drug overdose.

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.

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

1989: Prix France Culture de Littérature Étrangère

1990: Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

1991: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction shortlist for The Music of Chance

1993: Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan

1995: Independent Spirit award for best first screenplay for Smoke

1996: Bodil Awards – Best American Film: Smoke

1996: John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence

2001: International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Timbuktu

2003: Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

2004: International Dublin Literary Award shortlist for The Book of Illusions

2006: Prince of Asturias Award for Literature

2006: Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Literature

2007: Honorary doctor from the University of Liège

2007: International Dublin Literary Award longlist for The Brooklyn Follies

2007: Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

2008: International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Travels in the Scriptorium

Published works

Fiction

Squeeze Play (1982) (written under pseudonym Paul Benjamin)

The New York Trilogy (1987) ISBN 9780140169638

City of Glass (1985)

Ghosts (1986)

The Locked Room (1986)

In the Country of Last Things (1987) ISBN 9780140097054

Moon Palace (1989) ISBN 9781101563816

The Music of Chance (1990) ISBN 9780140157390

Leviathan (1992)

Mr. Vertigo (1994)

Timbuktu (1999)

The Book of Illusions (2002)

Oracle Night (2003)

The Brooklyn Follies (2005)

Travels in the Scriptorium (2006)

Man in the Dark (2008)

Invisible (2009)

Sunset Park (2010)

Day/Night (2013)

4 3 2 1 (2017)

Baumgartner (2023)

Memoir

The Invention of Solitude (1982)

The Red Notebook (1995) (originally printed in Granta (44); 1993)

Hand to Mouth (1997)

Winter Journal (2012)

Report from the Interior (2013)

Nonfiction

The Art of Hunger (1992)

Collected Prose (contains The Invention of Solitude, The Art of Hunger, The Red Notebook, and Hand to Mouth as well as various other previously uncollected pieces) (first edition, 2005; expanded second edition, 2010)

Here and Now: Letters, 2008–2011 (2013) A collection of letters exchanged with J. M. Coetzee

A Life in Words: In Conversation with I. B. Siegumfeldt (2017)

Talking to Strangers: Selected Essays, Prefaces, and Other Writings, 1967–2017 (2019)

Groundwork: Autobiographical Writings, 1979–2012 (2020)

Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (2021)

Long Live King Kobe: Following the Murder of Tyler Kobe Nichols [with photographs by Spencer Ostrander] (2022)

Bloodbath Nation [with photographs by Spencer Ostrander] (2023)

Poetry

Unearth (1974)

Wall Writing (1976)

Fragments from the Cold (1977)

Facing the Music (1980)

Disappearances: Selected Poems (1988)

Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays 1970–1979 (1990)

Collected Poems (2007)

White Spaces: Selected Poems and Early Prose (2020)

Screenplays

Smoke (1995)

Blue in the Face (1995)

Lulu on the Bridge (1998)

The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007)

Edited collections

The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (1982)

True Tales of American Life (first published under the title I Thought My Father Was God, and Other True Tales from NPR's National Story Project) (2001)

Translations

Fits and Starts: Selected Poems of Jacques Dupin, translated by Paul Auster, Living Hand Editions, 1974

"The Uninhabited: Selected Poems of André du Bouchet" (1976)

Life/Situations, by Jean-Paul Sartre (1977) (in collaboration with Lydia Davis)

Aboard the Aquitaine, by Georges Simenon (1979) (with Lydia Davis)

A Tomb for Anatole by Stéphane Mallarmé (1983)

Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1998) (translation of Pierre Clastres' ethnography Chronique des indiens Guayaki)

Vicious Circles: Two fictions & "After the Fact", by Maurice Blanchot, 1999

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (2005)

Miscellaneous

Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (1990)

The Story of My Typewriter with paintings by Sam Messer (2002)

"The Accidental Rebel" (April 23, 2008: article in The New York Times)

"ALONE" (2015) – Prose piece from 1969 published in six copies along with "Becoming the Other in Translation" (2014) by Siri Hustvedt. Published by Danish small press Ark Editions.

"Film Close Up: Smoke and Blue in the Face" (2022) Book by Chris Wade on Auster and Wayne Wang's 1995 films. Auster was interviewed for the book and helped with the edit.

Other media

In 1993, a movie adaptation of The Music of Chance was released. Auster features in a cameo role at the end of the film.

In 1994 City of Glass was adapted as a graphic novel by artist David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik. Auster's close friend, noted cartoonist Art Spiegelman, produced the adaptation.

In 1998, Auster was the executive producer on the short film I Remember from filmmaker Avi Zev Weider, who adapted it from Joe Brainard’s book I Remember.

From 1999 to 2001, Auster was part of NPR's National Story Project, a monthly radio show in which, together With NPR correspondent Jacki Lyden, Auster read stories sent in by NPR listeners across America. Listeners were invited to send in stories of "anywhere from two paragraphs to two pages" that "must be true", from which Auster later selected entries, edited them and subsequently read them on the air. Auster read over 4,000 stories submitted to the show, with a few dozen eventually featured on the show and many more anthologized in two 2002 books edited by Auster.

Jazz trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler's 2001 album Hide and Seek borrows the words and language from Auster's short play Hide and Seek, which Mantler found in Auster's Hand to Mouth.

Don Delillo‘s 2003 novel Cosmopolis is dedicated to Auster.

Auster narrated "Ground Zero" (2004), an audio guide created by the Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva) and Soundwalk and produced by NPR, which won the Dalton Pen Award for Multi-media/Audio (2005), and was nominated for an Audie Award for best Original Work (2005).

Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth's composition ... ce qui arrive ... (2004) combines the recorded voice of Paul Auster reading from his books Hand to Mouth and The Red Notebook, either as straight recitation, integrated with other sounds as if in a radio play, or passed through an electronically realized string resonator so that the low tones interact with those of a string ensemble. A video by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster runs throughout the work featuring the cabaret artist and actress Georgette Dee.