Background

Paul Auster was born on February 3, 1947, in Newark, New Jersey, United States. He is the son of middle-class parents Samuel and Queenie (née Bogat) Auster. He grew up with the sister in South Orange and Newark.

Education

Paul Auster read books enthusiastically and developed an interest in writing early. When Auster was nine years old, he wrote his first novel. The future author studied at Columbia High School. After graduating from school, he went on a trip to Europe, visited Italy, Spain, Paris, and Dublin. Returning to the United States, he entered Columbia University where he studied English literature, comparative literature, and French poetry. He had also a variety of freelance jobs and wrote articles for university magazines. At this university, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1969 and a Master of Arts degree in 1970.

Career

After graduating from university, Paul Auster had been a sailor on an oil tanker for a year. Then he moved to France, where he began translating the works of French writers. In 1974, he moved back to New York. Throughout the 1970s he wrote mainly poetry and essays which appeared in various magazines including the New York Review of books.

His acclaimed debut work was a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude. The book The Invention of Solitude is dedicated to Auster's memoirs about the death of his father and reflections on writing. He also published other autobiographical books, as well as several books of poems and collections of essays.

His first novel Squeeze Play was written under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin and was published in 1984. In 1987, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. The author used the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, space, language, and literature creating his own distinctively postmodern form in the process. In 1987 he also published the book In The Country of Last Things, then the novels The Temple of the Moon and Leviathan, the characters of which are obsessed with the desire to chronicle the lives of others.

Paul Oster translated the works of such authors as Joan Miro, Jean-Paul Sartre, Joseph Joubert, Stefan Mallarme, and others into English. In addition, he wrote scripts for two films by Wayne Wong - Smoke and Blue in the Face, was the screenwriter and director of the film Lulu on the Bridge. His second work as a scriptwriter and film director was in 2007 in the film The Inner Life of Martin Frost.

As much of Auster’s fiction explores ideas of the self and often features the author in variously explicit and veiled incarnations critics frequently speculated on the extent to which he employed elements of autobiography. The biography of the protagonist of Invisible (2009), for example, closely resembles Auster’s own, but the high drama of the plot which delves into murder and incest is clearly fictional. Though expressly nonfiction, the pointedly unstudied and fragmentary Winter Journal (2012) was written in the second person and comprised self-reflective meditations interspersed with enumerations of Auster’s experiences, preferences, and travels. A companion volume, Report from the Interior (2013), arrayed a similarly eclectic selection of anecdotes alongside deeper analyses of some of his cinematic influences and a selection of letters exchanged with his ex-wife, writer Lydia Davis.

Auster’s first novel in seven years, 4 3 2 1, was published in 2017.

Achievements

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  Paul Auster's books have been translated into more than forty languages. His writings were used in some music albums as the lyrics of the songs. Some of his books appeared in Russian film Plus One and in the novel To the End of the Land by David Grossman. His voice can be heard in some musical works as well. His book Moon Palace is read in German schools in the last year of study as preparation for the English examination. There is a memorial stone in honor of Paul Auster on the Brooklyn Celebrity Path.

Works

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• book

  • Collected Poems

    (Taut, densely lyrical, and everywhere informed by a power...)

    2007
  • Invisible

    (Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Au...)

    2009
  • The Book of Illusions

    (A man's obsession with a silent-film star sends him on a ...)

    2002
  • Winter Journal

    (On January 3, 2011, exactly one month before his sixty-fo...)

    2012
  • Sunset Park

    (Set during the American financial recession in 2008, the ...)

    2010
  • Day/Night

    (Day/Night brings together two metaphysical novels that mi...)

    2013
  • The New York Trilogy

    (Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquel...)

    1987
  • The Red Notebook

    (The Red Notebook brings together in one volume all of Pau...)

    1995
  • Mr. Vertigo

    (Walter Claireborne Rawley, renowned nationwide as "Walt t...)

    1994
  • 4 3 2 1

    (Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternit...)

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

    (A remarkably candid, and often surprisingly dramatic, inv...)

    2017
  • Oracle Night

    (Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illnes...)

    2003
  • Hand to Mouth

    (Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure is a fascinat...)

    1997
  • Moon Palace

    (Marco Stanley Fogg is an orphan, a child of the sixties, ...)

    1989
  • The Music of Chance

    (This novel follows Jim Nashe who, after squandering an un...)

    1990
  • The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry

    (This collection highlights some of the very best verse th...)

    1982
  • Squeeze Play

    (Someone's trying to kill former baseball star George Chap...)

    1984
  • Here and Now: Letters 2008-2011

    (After a meeting at an Australian literary festival brough...)

    2013
  • In the Country of Last Things

    (In a distant and unsettling future, Anna Blume is on a mi...)

    1987
  • Man in the Dark

    (Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a ca...)

    2008
  • Auggie Wren's Christmas Story

    (An unconventional story it is, involving a lost wallet, a...)

    1990
  • Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, Collaborations with Artists, and Interviews

    (An essential collection from one of the finest thinkers a...)

    2005
  • Facing the Music

    (A slim volume of poems, most of which first appeared in t...)

    1980
  • The Invention of Solitude

    (It is a memoir, established Auster’s reputation as a majo...)

    1982
  • Leviathan

    ("Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a roa...)

    1992
  • True Tales of American Life

    (The stories in this book were submitted by listeners of N...)

    2001
  • The Art of Hunger

    (The Red Notebook is a collection of autobiographical sket...)

    1992
  • Travels in the Scriptorium

    (An old man awakens, disoriented, in an unfamiliar chamber...)

    2007
  • Report from the Interior

    (Paul Auster's most intimate autobiographical work to date...)

    2013
  • Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays 1970-1979

    (A collection of poetry and prose from Paul Auster. The bo...)

    1991
  • The Story of My Typewriter

    (This is the story of Paul Auster's typewriter. The typewr...)

    2002
  • The Brooklyn Follies

    (Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estra...)

    2005
  • Timbuktu

    (Mr. Bones, the canine hero of Paul Auster's astonishing n...)

    1999

• movie

  • Lulu On The Bridge

    (Lulu on the Bridge is an American romantic-mystery drama ...)

    1998
  • Blue In The Face

    (In the uproarious follow-up to the hit comedy Smoke, Harv...)

    1995

Politics

Paul Auster is negative about Trump's politics. He considers the United States as a racist country in a greater degree cause of president Donald Trump. He thinks that America is getting to that point that the whole political system is broken. He's eschewing the election night parties, choosing instead to watch at home. And Trump's speeches sometimes seem to Paul similar to Hitler's.

Views

Auster weds commercial genres to serious investigation of identity, free will and fate, spirituality, and, lately, love. His writing has always shown tenderness for people at the margins of cultures or torn between two cultures - from the poor in the consumption-mad United States to Americans who have metaphysical affinities with the Asian cultures (Moon Palace and Lulu on the Bridge).

Throughout his career, Auster has borrowed from the world’s most culturally diverse literary corpus, including medieval and Renaissance quest, quest-romance, and quest-epic forms that by the early modern period had absorbed tales from Christian, Arabic, and Mediterranean sources for many centuries. He also admires parody forms such as Don Quixote and Orlando Furioso.

Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Nathaniel Hawthorne have also had a strong influence on Auster's writing. Auster has specifically referred to characters from Poe and Hawthorne in his novels, for example, William Wilson in City of Glass or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in The Locked Room, both from The New York Trilogy.

Quotations: "Becoming a writer is not a "career decision" like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days."

"I always feel like a beginner and I'm continually running into the same difficulties, the same blocks, the same despairs. You make so many mistakes as a writer, cross out so many bad sentences and ideas, discard so many worthless pages, that finally what you learn is how stupid you are. It's a humbling occupation."

“Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.”

"There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round."

"For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity."

"We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all - most of us, anyway - want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them."

"If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything."

"I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it's a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can't separate persona from psyche; you just can't do it."

"The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth."

"I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future."

"Money's important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don't have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life."

Membership

Paul Auster was a member of the Official Competition jury at the 50th Cannes International Film Festival in 1997, at the 53rd Venice International Film Festival in 1996, and at the 55th annual San Sebastian International Film Festival in 2007.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

• Paul Auster was a member of the PEN American Center Board of Trustees.

  PEN American Center , United States

  2004 - 2009

• Paul Auster was a Vice President of the PEN American Center Board of Trustees.

  PEN American Center , United States

  2005 - 2007

Personality

Paul Auster is not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes him. He likes the sound a typewriter makes. Keyboards have always intimidated him. He has never been able to think clearly with his fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument for him.

He is also obsessive about hygiene.

Quotes from others about the person

• "I love how much he loves people. That is clear in every word, every line, every page, every punch of his typewriter keys, his huge heart for all kinds of people amid the incomprehensible totality of life, and the worthwhile effort of writing to understand bits of it." - Paul Nugent

Connections

Paul Auster married to Lydia Davis in 1974. They have one son together, Daniel Auster. They divorced in 1977.

In 1981 Auster married to Siri Hustvedt. They have one daughter, Sophie Auster.

Father:

Samuel Auster

Mother:

Queenie Bogat Auster

ex-wife:

Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis was born on July 15, 1947. She is an American writer noted for literary works of extreme brevity. Davis is also a short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, and has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.

Wife:

Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt was born on February 19, 1955. She is an American novelist and essayist. Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, seven novels, two books of essays, and several works of non-fiction. Her books What I Loved and The Summer Without Men were international bestsellers. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.

Son:

Daniel Auster

Daniel Auster was born in 1977. He is an actor, known for Smoke (1995).

Daughter:

Sophie Auster

Sophie Auster was born on July 6, 1987. She is an American singer, songwriter, and actress.