Renowned Author Paul Auster Dies at 77: Remembering His Legacy and Impact on Literature

Paul Auster, author of 34 books including the famous New York Trilogy, has died aged 77.

The author died on Tuesday of complications from lung cancer, his friend and co-author Jacki Lyden confirmed to the Guardian.

Auster became famous for his “well-styled postmodernist fiction, surprisingly in which narrators are infrequent as well as unreliable and the basis of the plot is constantly changing,” said novelist Joyce Carol Oates written in 2010.

His stories often play with themes of coincidence, chance and fate. Many of his protagonists are writers themselves, and his body of work is self-referential, with characters from early novels reappearing in later ones.

“Auster has established one of the most unique fields in modern literature,” write a critique Michael Dirda in 2008. “His narrative voice is as hypnotic as the voice of the Old Mariner. Start one of his books and on page two you can’t choose but hear.”

‘This may be the last thing I ever write’: Paul Auster on cancer, attachment and the fallacy of closure

The author was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. According to Auster, his writing life began at the age of eight when he missed getting an autograph from his football hero, Willie Mays, because neither he nor his parents had brought a pencil to the game. Since then, he took a pencil everywhere. “If you have a pencil in your pocket, there is a good chance that one day you will be tempted to start using it,” he wrote in his 1995 essay.

While walking at a summer camp at the age of 14, Auster saw a boy inches away from him get struck by lightning and die instantly – an event that he said It “completely changed” his life and that he thought about it “every day”. Chance, “understandably, became a recurring theme in his fiction,” write the criticism Laura Miller in 2017. A similar incident occurs in Auster’s 2017 shortlisted novel 4 3 2 1: one of the book’s four versions of the main character Archie Ferguson runs under a tree at summer camp and is killed by a branch that falls when struck by lightning.

Auster studied at Columbia University before moving to Paris in the early 1970s, where he worked various jobs, including translation, and lived with his “on-again” girlfriend. , the writer Lydia Davis, whom he met while at college. In 1974, they returned to the US and married. In 1977, the couple had a son, Daniel, but they divorced soon after.

Auster and Siri Hustvedt at home in Brooklyn in 2020. Photo: Alamy

In January 1979, Auster’s father, Samuel, died, and the event became the seed for the writer’s first memoir, The Invention of Solitude, which was published in 1982. In it, Auster revealed that he had killed his paternal grandfather and was killed by his grandmother, who was freed because of wickedness. “A boy cannot live through this without being affected as a man,” Auster wrote of his father, with whom he described himself as having “a relationship or -movable, cut off from each other on either side of a wall.”

Auster’s breakthrough came with the 1985 publication of City of Glass, the first novel in his New York trilogy. Although the books appear to be mystery stories, Auster used the form to pose existential questions about identity. “The more [Auster’s detectives] stalking their curious quarry, the more they seem to be really stalking the Big Questions—the implications of authorship, the enigmas of epistemology, the veils and masks of language,” wrote critic and screenwriter Stephen Schiff in 1987.

Auster published regularly throughout the 80s, 90s and 00s, writing over a dozen novels including Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002) and Oracle Night (2003). He also dabbled in film, writing the screenplay for Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang, for which he won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay in 1995.

In 1981, Auster met writer Siri Hustvedt and they married the following year. In 1987 they had a daughter, Sophie, who became a singer and actor. In Auster’s 1992 novel, Leviathan, about a man who accidentally blows himself up, there is a character called Iris Vegan, who is the heroine of Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold.

Auster is survived by Hustvedt, their daughter Sophie Auster, his sister Janet Auster, and a grandson.