Paul Auster, prolific American author of novels, poems and films propelled onto the international literary scene by his “New York Trilogy”, died of complications from lung cancer at the age of 77, announced a friend of family. The writer died at his home in Brooklyn, New York (United States), Jacki Lyden said in an email to AFP, after informing the New York Times. “Paul passed away this evening, at home, surrounded by his loved ones,” she wrote on Tuesday April 30. His wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, announced last year that he was suffering from cancer.
Born in 1947 in the state of New Jersey, Paul Auster became a New York literary icon. Author of more than thirty books, he has been translated into more than 40 languages. Several of his novels explore the theme of chance and coincidences which change the destiny of his characters. In City of Glass, Returned And The Hidden Room which form the “Trilogy”, its characters set out in search of their identity like detectives in the labyrinth of Manhattan bristling with skyscrapers where everything is only reflections and false pretenses.
This descendant of Ashkenazi Jews studied French, Italian and British literature at Columbia University in New York. After his studies, he lived in Paris from 1971 to 1975 and translated French poets, but he had to take on more jobs before he could make a living from his books. The inheritance from his father, who died in 1979, allowed him to devote himself to writing.
Revered in France
He became known in 1982 with The invention of solitude, an autobiographical novel where he tries to understand his father’s personality. The novelist broke through on the international scene in 1987, particularly in Europe, with his “New York Trilogy”, a noir novel inspired by the detective genre. Also a screenwriter, Paul Auster contributed to the film Smokewhich portrays lost souls gravitating around a Brooklyn tobacco shop, and its sequel Brooklyn Boogie, two films he directed with Wayne Wang. Among his other successful works are: Moon Palace, The Book of Illusions And Brooklyn Follies.
A revered writer in France, which he considers his “second country”, he received the Foreign Medici Prize for “Leviathan” in 1993. An avowed democrat, he denounced the Bush years in one of his books. In April 2022, he lost his son Daniel Auster, 44, whom he had with the writer Lydia Davis, his first wife. He died of an “accidental overdose” in New York after being charged with involuntary manslaughter for the death at the end of 2021, also by overdose, of his daughter Ruby, aged only ten months. Despite being diagnosed with cancer the same year, he completed a final book with a nostalgic tone, Baumgartner.