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

• Paul Auster, a prominent figure in literature and film, has died at the age of 77.
• He has written more than 30 books, including the “New York Trilogy” and “4 3 2 1.”
• Auster’s work combines elements of genre, politics, and self-reference, and has earned him a reputation as a postmodernist writer.

Paul Auster, the prolific literary figure and award-winning film director known for original stories and meta-narratives such as the New York Trilogy and 4 3 2 1, has died at the age of 77. did.

Mr. Auster’s death was confirmed Wednesday by his literary representative, the Carol Mann Agency, but additional details were not immediately released. Auster was diagnosed with cancer in 2022.

Since the 1970s, Auster has completed more than 30 books, which have been translated into dozens of languages. A longtime fixture in Brooklyn’s literary circles, he never achieved great commercial success in the United States, but his cosmopolitan worldview and erudite, introspective style earned him widespread praise abroad, and he was even admired by the French government. He was appointed Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. He was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Dubbed the “Dean of American Postmodernists” and “the most meta of American metafiction writers,” Auster blends history, politics, genre experimentation, existential exploration, and self-conscious references to writers and writing. I let it happen. The “New York Trilogy,” which includes “City of Glass,” “Ghost,” and “The Locked Room,” is a post-production series in which names and identities are ambiguous and one main character is Paul Auster. It was a modern detective story. The short “Journey through the Scriptorium” wraps up stories within stories in which a political prisoner is forced to read a series of stories by fellow victims, eventually including his own. .

The author’s longest and most ambitious work of fiction is 4 3 2 1, published in 2017 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. At over 800 pages, the novel is a four-tone realism story in the post-World War II era, from summer camp and high school baseball to student life in New York and Paris during the mass protests of the late 1960s. It depicts the parallel journey of Archibald Isaac Ferguson. .

“Identical but different means four boys with the same parents, the same body, and the same genetic material, each living in different houses in different towns, each with their own unique circumstances.” Auster writes in his novel. “Each one goes their separate ways, but they’re all still the same person, with three imaginary versions of themselves, and then themselves thrown in as the fourth person.” I am the author.”

His other works include the nonfiction compilations Groundwork and Talking to Strangers. Family memoir “The Invention of Solitude.” Biography of novelist Stephen Crane. Novels “Leviathan” and “Talking to Strangers,” and poetry collection “White Space.” The title character of his latest novel, “Baumgardner,” is a widowed professor who is haunted by the fear of death and asks herself, “Where will my heart take me next?”

Auster was such an old-fashioned writer that he worked with a typewriter and despised email and other forms of electronic communication. However, he had an unusually active career in film compared to his fellow writers.

In the mid-1990s, Auster collaborated with director Wayne Wang to produce the acclaimed arthouse film Smoke, an adaptation of Auster’s humorous story about a Brooklyn cigar store and a customer named Paul. did. The film, which also starred Harvey Keitel, Stockard Channing, and William Hurt, earned Auster an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. Wang and Auster quickly followed up “Smoke” with “Blue in the Face.” This improvised tale returns to a Brooklyn cigar store, once again starring Keitel and featuring everyone from Lou Reed to Lily Tomlin.

Auster eventually made the film himself. Keitel appeared in the 1998 love story Lulu on the Bridge, which Auster directed and co-wrote with Vanessa Redgrave. Nine years later, Auster wrote and directed the drama Inside Martin Frost, starring David Thewlis as a novelist and Elaine Jacob as a woman who has a strange connection to the stories he had written. .

“I’ve worked on four films so far, and I’ve never had a problem talking to actors,” Auster told director Wim Wenders in a conversation published in Interview magazine in 2017. he said. “I always felt a great harmony with them. After those experiences, I realized there were similarities between writing novels and acting. Writers do it with words on the page, and actors do it with your body.The effort is the same.

Auster married fellow writer Shiri Hustvedt in 1982, and they had a daughter, Sophie, who appeared in “Inside Martin Frost.” He also had a son, Daniel, from a previous marriage to writer and translator Lydia Davis. Daniel Auster struggled with drug addiction and would die of an overdose in 2022, shortly after being charged with second-degree manslaughter in the death of his young daughter Ruby.

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

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Born Paul Benjamin Auster in Newark, New Jersey, he grew up in a middle-class Jewish family, torn between his obscenely frugal father and his recklessly extravagant mother. Ta. He soon begins to feel like an outsider in his family, disgusted by his family’s materialism, and prefers traditional job security to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Edgar Allan.・I became inspired by Poe’s stories.

His ideals will be put to the test. After graduating from Columbia University, Auster struggled for years before he was able to find a publisher or make money with his books. He wrote poetry, translated French literature, worked on an oil tanker, tried selling baseball board games, and even considered raising insects in his basement to make some money.

“All my life, my only ambition was to write,” Auster wrote in his short memoir Hand to Mouth, published in 1995. Becoming a writer is not a “career decision” like becoming a doctor or a police officer, it’s not so much a choice, as long as you accept the fact that you’re not one. Even if you are better suited for other things, you must be prepared to walk a long and difficult path for the rest of your days. ”