During the summers of 1958 and 1959, Auster attened, 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:[12] a boy being struck by lightning and dying instantly.[13] The boy was standing a few inches away from him at the time. This event changed his life, thinking about it every day.[14]
Career
After graduating from Columbia University with B.A. and M.A. degrees (English, Comparative Literature) in 1970,[15][16] he moved to Paris where, among other jobs, he tried to earn a living translating French literature.[1] 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[17] and Joseph Joubert.[18][19] His work as a translator led to the publication in 1982 of The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, which he edited.[20]
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),[21] and is often cited as his most widely known work to the general reading public.[19]
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.[21] Auster disagrees with this analysis, because he believes that "the Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude".[22]
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.[21]
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")[12] on the long, unending history of gun violence in America (Bloodbath Nation).[21] 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.[24]
In 2012, Auster said in an interview that he would not visit Turkey, in protest at its treatment of journalists. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan replied: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come, or not?"[29] Auster responded: "According to the latest numbers gathered by International PEN, there are nearly one hundred writers imprisoned in Turkey, not to speak of independent publishers such as Ragıp Zarakolu, whose case is being closely watched by PEN Centers around the world."[30]
Auster was willing to give Iranian translators permission to write Persian versions of his works in exchange for a small fee; Iran does not recognize international copyright laws.[31]
One of Auster's later books, A Life in Words, was published in October 2017 by Seven Stories Press. It brought together two years of conversations with the Danish scholar I.B. Siegumfeldt about each of Auster's fiction and non-fiction works. It has been a primary source for understanding Auster's approach to his works.[32]
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".[33] 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."[34]
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."[35]
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". He 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'."[36]
Personal life and death
Auster's first marriage was to the writer Lydia Davis in 1974. They had one child together, their son Daniel Auster. By 1979 they were separated and were divorced in 1981.[37] In 1981, Auster married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, the daughter of professor and scholar Lloyd Hustvedt. They lived in Brooklyn[3] and had one daughter, Sophie Auster, a singer.[38]
Daniel Auster was arrested on April 16, 2022, and charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month-old infant daughter Ruby, who consumed some of the heroin and fentanyl he was using.[39][40] Ruby had died five months previously, on November 1, 2021. At the time of the arrest, police remained unclear about how the baby could have ingested the drugs while lying beside her father when he was napping.[41]
On April 26, 2022, Daniel Auster died from an overdose.[42] Daniel Auster was also known for his association with the Club Kids and their ringleader Michael Alig, and was present during the killing of fellow Club Kid Andre Melendez.[43]
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.[44] He described right-wing Republicans as "jihadists",[45][46] and the election of Donald Trump as "the most appalling thing I've seen in politics in my life".[47]
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.[48][49]
Paul Auster died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn, on April 30, 2024, at the age of 77.[50][16] He was survived by his wife Siri Hustvedt, their daughter Sophie Auster, his sister Janet Auster, and a grandson.[51]
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)
The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (1982)[74]
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)[75]
Translations
Fits and Starts: Selected Poems of Jacques Dupin, translated by Paul Auster, Living Hand Editions, 1974
"The Accidental Rebel" (April 23, 2008: article in The New York Times)[78]
"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.[79]
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.[13]
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.[85] 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.[86] Auster read over 4,000 stories submitted to the show,[87] with a few dozen eventually featured on the show and many more anthologized in two 2002 books edited by Auster.[88][89]
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.[90]
Auster narrated "Ground Zero" (2004), an audio guide created by the Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva) and Soundwalk[91] and produced by NPR,[92] which won the Dalton Pen Award for Multi-media/Audio (2005),[93] and was nominated for an Audie Award for best Original Work (2005).[94]
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.[95] A video by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster runs throughout the work featuring the cabaret artist and actress Georgette Dee.[96]
In 2005 his daughter, Sophie, recorded an album of songs in both French and English, entitled Sophie Auster, with the band One Ring Zero, which included a few songs that her father provided the lyrics for.[97]
Auster's voice may be heard on the 2005 album entitled We Must Be Losing It by The Farangs. The two tracks are entitled "Obituary in the Present Tense" and "Between the Lines".[98]
The lyrics of Fionn Regan's 2006 song "Put A Penny in the Slot" mention Auster and his novella Timbuktu.[101]
In the 2008 novel To the End of the Land by David Grossman, the bedroom bookshelf of the central IDF soldier character Ofer is described as prominently displaying several Auster titles.
In the 2009 documentary Act of God, Auster is interviewed on his experience of watching another boy struck and killed by lightning when he was 14.[102]
In the 2011 documentary on Charlotte RamplingThe Look, Auster meditates on beauty with Rampling on his moored tug boat on the Hudson River.[103]
Notes
^Prior to meeting Wayne Wong who first invited Auster to collaborate on all aspects of the filmmaking process, Auster did have some limited involvement in the film adaptation of his novel The Music of Chance via consultation and a small cameo appearance (uncredited) toward the end of the film
^This reprints both Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark, together in a single volume
^The contents of this book have been taken from the following previously published volumes: Unearth (Living Hand, 1974), Wall Writing (The Figures, 1976), Fragments from Cold (Parenthèse, 1977), White Spaces (Station Hill, 1980), Facing the Music (Station Hill, 1980), and The Art of Hunger (Menard Press, 1982). "Spokes" originally appeared in Poetry (March 1972); "First Words" is published here for the first time.
^"The Inner Life of Martin Frost" is a fictional movie that is described in full in Auster's novel The Book of Illusions. It is the only film that David Zimmer —the protagonist of the latter novel— watches of Hector Mann's later, hidden films. It is the story of a man meeting a girl – an intense relationship with a touch of supernatural elements. Auster later created a real movie of the same name.[73] (also see "Other Media" section below).
^A Christmas story that first appeared on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on December 25, 1990. It led to Auster's collaboration on a film adaptation, "Smoke".
^ Auster wrote that Brainard’s “I Remember is a masterpiece. One by one, the so-called important books of our time will be forgotten, but Joe Brainard's modest little gem will endure. In simple, forthright, declarative sentences, he charts the map of the human soul and permanently alters the way we look at the world. I Remember is both uproariously funny and deeply moving. It is also one of the few totally original books I have ever read.”[84]
^ abFreeman, John. "At home with Siri and Paul"Archived March 9, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, The Jerusalem Post, April 3, 2008. Retrieved September 19, 2008. "Like so many people in New York, both of them are spiritual refugees of a sort. Auster hails from Newark, New Jersey, and Hustvedt from Minnesota, where she was raised the daughter of a professor, among a clan of very tall siblings."
^Begley, Adam. "Case of the Brooklyn Symbolist"Archived May 24, 2013, at the Wayback Machine, The New York Times, August 30, 1992. Retrieved September 19, 2008. "The grandson of first-generation Jewish immigrants, he was born in Newark in 1947, grew up in South Orange and attended high school in Maplewood, 20 miles southwest of New York."
^Auster, Paul. Winter Journal (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 2012), p. 61.
^Hurezanu, Daniela (2006). "A Tomb for Anatole by Stéphane Mallarmé: Translated by Paul Auster. New York: New Directions, ISBN 0-811215-938". Translation Review. 71 (1): 67–70. doi:10.1080/07374836.2006.10523938. ISSN0737-4836.
^Joubert, Joseph (2005). The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. NYRB Classics. Translated by Auster, Paul (1 ed.).
^Dirda, Michael (December 4, 2008). "Spellbound". The New York Review of Books. Archived from the original on November 12, 2019. Retrieved November 12, 2019.
^Another Paul Auster novel, 'Man in the Dark', was due to be published by Henry Holt in the U.S. on Monday September 1, 2008.[1]Archived February 15, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
^Auster, Paul (December 25, 1990). "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story". Opinion. The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 11, 2021. Retrieved November 11, 2021.
^Auster, Paul; Messer, Sam, eds. (2002). The story of my typewriter (1st ed.). New York: D.A.P. ISBN978-1-891024-32-0.
^Auster, Paul (April 23, 2008). "The Accidental Rebel". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 15, 2018. Retrieved February 19, 2017.
Paul Auster, Gérard de Cortanze: La solitude du labyrinthe. Paris: Actes Sud, 1997.
Franchot Ballinger: "Ambigere: The Euro-American Picaro and the Native American Trickster". MELUS, 17 (1991–92), pp. 21–38.
Dennis Barone: "Auster's Memory". The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 32–34
Charles Baxter: "The Bureau of Missing Persons: Notes on Paul Auster's Fiction". The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 40–43.
Harold Bloom (ed.): Paul Auster. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publ.; 2004.
Thorsten Carstensen: "Skepticism and Responsibility: Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions." in: Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 58:4 (2017): 411–425.
Martine Chard-Hutchinson "Paul Auster (1947– )". In: Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub (eds). Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourceboook. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997, pp. 13–20.
Alain Chareyre-Méjan, Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert. "Ce que Paul Auster n'a jamais dit: une logique du quelconque". In: Annick Duperray (ed.). L'œuvre de Paul Auster: approches et lectures plurielles. Actes du colloque Paul Auster. Aix-en-Provence: Actes Sud, 1995, pp. 176–184.
Gérard de Cortanze, James Rudnick: Paul Auster's New York. Gerstenberg, New York; Hildesheim, 1998
(in French) Gérard de Cortanze. Le New York de Paul Auster. Paris: Les Éditions du Chêne-Hachette Livre, 1996.
Robert Creeley: "Austerities". The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 35–39.
Scott Dimovitz: "Public Personae and the Private I: De-Compositional Ontology in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy". MFS: Modern Fiction Studies. 52:3 (Fall 2006): 613–633.
Scott Dimovitz: "Portraits in Absentia: Repetition, Compulsion, and the Postmodern Uncanny in Paul Auster's Leviathan". Studies in the Novel. 40:4 (Winter 2008): 447–464.
William Drenttel (ed.): Paul Auster: A Comprehensive Bibliographic Checklist of Published Works 1968–1994. New York: Delos Press, 1994.
Annick Duperray: Paul Auster: Les ambiguïtés de la négation. Paris: Belin. 2003.
(in German) Christian Eilers: Paul Austers autobiographische Werke: Stationen einer Schriftstellerkarriere. Winter, Heidelberg 2019. (= American Studies – A Monograph Series; 301). ISBN978-3-8253-6954-5
(in German)Sven Gächter: Schreiben ist eine endlose Therapie: Der amerikanische Romancier Paul Auster über das allmähliche Entstehen von Geschichten. Weltwoche (December 31, 1992), p. 30.
François Gavillon: Paul Auster, gravité et légèreté de l'écriture. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000.
Charles Grandjeat: "Le hasard et la nécessité dans l'œuvre de Paul Auster". In: Annick Duperray (ed.). L'œuvre de Paul Auster: approches et lectures plurielles. Actes du colloque Paul Auster. Aix-en-Provence: Actes Sud, 1995, pp. 153–163.
(in German) Ulrich Greiner: Gelobtes Land. Amerikanische Schriftsteller über Amerika. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1997
Claude Grimal: "Paul Auster au cœur des labyrinthes". Europe: Revue Littéraire Mensuelle, 68:733 (1990), pp. 64–66.
Allan Gurganus: "How Do You Introduce Paul Auster in Three Minutes?". The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 7–8.
Anne M. Holzapfel: The New York trilogy. Whodunit? Tracking the structure of Paul Auster's anti-detective novels. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1996. (= Studien zur Germanistik und Anglistik; 11) ISBN3-631-49798-9
(in German) Beate Hötger: Identität im filmischen Werk von Paul Auster. Lang, Frankfurt am Main u.a. 2002. (= Europäische Hochschulschriften; Reihe 30, 84) ISBN3-631-38470-X
(in German) Heiko Jakubzik: Paul Auster und die Klassiker der American Renaissance. Dissertation, Universität Heidelberg 1999 (online text)
Bernd Herzogenrath: An Art of Desire. Reading Paul Auster. Amsterdam: Rodopi; 1999
Bernd Herzogenrath: "Introduction". In: Bernd Herzogenrath. An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 1–11.
Gerald Howard: Publishing Paul Auster. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 92–95.
Peter Kirkegaard: "Cities, Signs, Meanings in Walter Benjamin and Paul Auster: Or, Never Sure of Any of It", in Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 48 (1993): 161179.
Barry Lewis: "The Strange Case of Paul Auster". The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 53–61.
James Marcus: "Auster! Auster!". The Village Voice, 39 (August 30, 1994), pp. 55–56.
Brian McHale Constructing Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
Patricia Merivale: "The Austerized Version". Contemporary Literature, 38:1 (Spring 1997), pp. 185–197.
Christophe Metress: "Iles et archipels, sauver ce qui est récupérable: la fiction de Paul Auster". In: Annick Duperray (ed.). L'œuvre de Paul Auster: approches et lectures plurielles. Actes du colloque Paul Auster. Aix-en-Provence: Actes Sud, 1995, pp. 245–257.
James Peacock: "Carrying the Burden of Representation: Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions". Journal of American Studies, 40:1 (April 2006), pp. 53–70.
(in German) Werner Reinhart: Pikareske Romane der 80er Jahre. Ronald Reagan und die Renaissance des politischen Erzählens in den USA. (Acker, Auster, Boyle, Irving, Kennedy, Pynchon). Narr, Tübingen 2001
William Riggan: Picaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.
Mark Rudman: "Paul Auster: Some Elective Affinities". The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 44–45.
(in German) Michael Rutschky: "Die Erfindung der Einsamkeit: Der amerikanische Schriftsteller Paul Auster"'. Merkur, 45 (1991), pp. 1105–1113.
Edward H. Schafer: "Ways of Looking at the Moon Palace". Asia Major. 1988; 1(1):1–13.
(in German) Steffen Sielaff: Die postmoderne Odyssee. Raum und Subjekt in den Romanen von Paul Auster. Univ. Diss., Berlin 2004.
(in German) Joseph C. Schöpp: Ausbruch aus der Mimesis: Der amerikanische Roman im Zeichen der Postmoderne. München: Fink, 1990.
Motoyuki Shibata: "Being Paul Auster's Ghost". In: Dennis Barone (ed.). Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 183–188.
Ilana Shiloh: "Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: On the Road to Nowhere." New York, Peter Lang 2000.
Carsten Springer: Crises. The works of Paul Auster. Lang, Frankfurt am Main u.a. 2001. (= American culture; 1) ISBN3-631-37487-9
Carsten Springer: A Paul Auster Sourcebook. Frankfurt a. Main u. a., Peter Lang, 2001.
Eduardo Urbina: La ficción que no cesa: Paul Auster y Cervantes. Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2007.
Eduardo Urbina: "La ficción que no cesa: Cervantes y Paul Auster". Cervantes en el ámbito anglosajón. Eds. Diego Martínez Torrón and Bernd Dietz. Madrid: SIAL Ediciones, 2005. 433–42.
Eduardo Urbina: "Reflejos lunares, o la transformación paródica de la locura quijotesca en Moon Palace (1989) de Paul Auster". Siglos dorados; Homenaje an Augustin Redondo. Ed. Pierre Civil. Madrid: Castalia, 2004. 2: 1417–25.
Eduardo Urbina: "Parodias cervantinas: el Quijote en tres novelas de Paul Auster (La ciudad de cristal, El palacio de la luna y El libro de las ilusiones)". Calamo currente': Homenaje a Juan Bautista de Avalle Arce. Ed. Miguel Zugasti. RILCE (Universidad de Navarra) 23.1 (2007): 245–56.
Eduardo Urbina: "Reading Matters: Quixotic Fiction and Subversive Discourse in Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions". Critical Reflections: Essays on Golden Age Spanish Literature in Honor of James A. Parr. Eds. Barbara Simerka and Amy R. Williamsen. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006. 57–66.
Various authors: Special edition on Paul Auster. Critique. 1998 Spring; 39(3).
Aliki Varvogli: World That is the Book: Paul Auster's Fiction. Liverpool University Press, 2001. ISBN978-0-85323-697-9
Florian Felix Weyh: "Paul Auster". Kritisches Lexikon der fremdsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (26. Nachlieferung), pp. 1–10.
Curtis White: "The Auster Instance: A Ficto-Biography". The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 26–29.
Eric Wirth: "A Look Back from the Horizon". In: Dennis Barone (ed.). Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 171–182.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Paul Auster.
I want to tell you a story piece by Auster at The Guardian, November 6, 2006. The subtitle reads: "one of America's greatest living novelists, argues that fiction is 'magnificently useless', but the act of creation and the pleasure of reading are incomparable human joys that we should savour"