American author Paul Auster, best known for ‘The New York Trilogy’, dies at 77

• Paul Auster, a renowned figure of literature and film, died at the age of 77.
• He wrote more than 30 books, including “The New York Trilogy” and “4 3 2 1”.
• Auster’s works mixed genres, politics, and self-referential elements, earning him praise as a postmodernist writer.

Paul Auster, a prolific, award-winning writer and filmmaker best known for inventive narratives and meta-narratives such as “The New York Trilogy” and “4 3 2 1,” has died at the age of 77.

Auster’s death was confirmed Wednesday by her literary representatives, the Carol Mann Agency, which did not immediately provide additional details. Auster was diagnosed with cancer in 2022.

Starting in the 1970s, Auster accomplished more than 30 books, translated into dozens of languages. Long a resident of the Brooklyn literary scene, he never achieved major commercial success in the US, but he was widely admired abroad for his cosmopolitan worldview and erudite and introspective style and was awarded the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. Named Chevalier of Letters. In 1991. He was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Called “the dean of American post-modernists” and “the most meta of American meta-fantasy writers”, Auster blends history, politics, genre experiments, existential quests, and self-aware references to authors and writing. “The New York Trilogy,” which included “City of Glass,” “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room,” was a post-modern spy saga in which names and identities are blurred and one of the protagonists is a private eye named Paul Auster. The brief “Travels in the Scriptorium” wraps a story within a story as a political prisoner finds himself forced to read a series of stories by fellow victims that will eventually include his own story.

The author’s longest and most ambitious novel was “4 3 2 1”, which was published in 2017 and was a Booker finalist. This 800-plus page novel is a story of post-World War II quadratic realism, spanning everything from summer camp and high school baseball to student life in New York and Paris during the mass protests of the late 1960s. Archibald Isaac Ferguson has a parallel journey. ,

Auster writes in the novel, “Identical but different, meaning four boys with the same name, same parents, same body and same genetic material, but each living in a different house in a different city with his own circumstances. Is.” “Each one is on their own separate path, and yet they’re all still the same person, three fictional versions of themselves, and then with myself thrown in as number four for good measure; the author of the book.”

His other works include the nonfiction collections “Groundwork” and “Talking to Strangers”; a family memoir, “The Invention of Solitude”; Biography of novelist Stephen Crane; The novels “Leviathan” and “Talking to Strangers” and the poetry collection “White Space.” In her most recent novel, “Baumgardner”, the title character is a widowed professor haunted by mortality and asking herself “where her mind will take her next.”

Auster was such an old-fashioned writer that he worked on a typewriter and despised email and other forms of electronic communication. But his film career remained unusually active compared to his writing peers.

In the mid-1990s, Auster collaborated with director Wayne Wang on the acclaimed art-house film “Smoke”, an adaptation of Auster’s humorous story about a Brooklyn cigar shop and a certain customer named Paul. The film starred Harvey Keitel, Stockard Channing, and William Hurt, among others, and earned Auster an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. Wang and Auster immediately followed “Smoke” with “Blue in the Face”, an improvised story that returned to a Brooklyn cigar store and with appearances from everyone from Lou Reed to Lily Tomlin, again starring Keitel. .

Auster finally made movies she herself. Keitel was featured in “Lulu on the Bridge”, a love story released in 1998, which Auster directed and co-wrote with Vanessa Redgrave. Nine years later, Auster wrote and directed the play “The Inner Life of Martin Frost”, starring David Thewlis as a novelist and Irene Jacob as a woman who has a strange connection to the story she wrote. Have been.

Auster told director Wim Wenders during a 2017 conversation published in Interview magazine, “I’ve been in films four times, I’ve never had a problem talking to actors.” “I always felt very attuned to him. After those experiences I realized there is a similarity between writing fiction and acting. The writer does it with words on the page, and the actor does it with his body. The effort is The same.”

Auster married fellow writer Siri Hustvedt in 1982 and had a daughter, Sophie, who appeared in “The Inner Life of Martin Frost”. He also had a son, Daniel, from his previous marriage to writer-translator Lydia Davis. Daniel Auster would struggle with drug addiction and die of a drug overdose in 2022, shortly after being charged with second-degree murder in the death of his infant daughter Ruby.

Paul Auster never commented publicly on his son’s death, but he wrote frequently about fatherhood. In “The Invention of Solitude”, published in 1982, he reflected on the “thousands of hours” he spent with Daniel in the first three years of his life and wondered whether they mattered. Auster wrote, “It will be lost forever.” “All these things will disappear from the boy’s memory forever.”

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Born in Newark, New Jersey, Paul Benjamin Auster grew up in a middle-class Jewish household torn between his father’s frugality to the point of stinginess and his mother’s willingness to spend to the point of recklessness. He would soon feel like an outsider in his family, troubled by their materialism and inspired more by James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or the stories of Edgar Allan Poe than traditional job security.

Their ideals will be thoroughly tested. After graduating from Columbia University, Auster struggled for years before he was able to find a publisher or make money from his books. He wrote poetry, translated French literatureWorked on an oil tanker, attempted to market a baseball board game and even thought about earning income by growing worms in his basement.

“Always, my only ambition was to write,” Auster wrote in “Hand to Mouth”, a brief memoir published in 1995. Thinking I could make a living from it. Becoming a writer is not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a policeman, you don’t choose it so much as it is chosen, and once you accept the fact that you are not fit for anything else. But, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.”