● Early life

Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey,[2] to Jewish middle-class parents of
Polish descent, Queenie (née Bogat) and Samuel Auster.[3][4] He grew up in South
Orange, New Jersey[5] and Newark[6] and graduated from Columbia High School in
Maplewood.[7]
Career
After graduating from Columbia University with B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1970, he
moved to Paris, France where he earned a living translating French literature. Since
returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, and novels, as well
as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

Auster greeting Israeli President Shimon Peres with Salman Rushdie and Caro
Llewellyn in 2008
Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude,
Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected stories published
collectively as The New York Trilogy. Although these books allude to the detective
genre they are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a
series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and
questions of identity, space, language, and literature, creating his own distinctively
postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process. According to Auster,
"...the Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude."[8]
The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later
publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and
random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between
people and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace).
Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's
inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the
films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay)
and Blue in the Face. Auster's more recent works, from Oracle Night (2003) to 4 3 2
1 (2017), have also met with critical acclaim.
He was on the PEN American Center Board of Trustees from 2004 to 2009,[9][10] and
Vice President during 2005 to 2007.[11][12]
In 2012, Auster was quoted as saying in an interview that he would not visit Turkey,
in protest of its treatment of journalists. The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan replied: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come or not?"[13] 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".[14]
 Auster's most recent book, A Life in Words, was published in October 2017 by
Seven Stories Press. It brings together three years of conversations with the Danish
scholar I.B. Siegumfeldt about each one of his works, both fiction and non-fiction. It is
a primary source for understanding Auster's approach to his work.[15]
Auster is 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.[16]
Themes
Much of the early scholarship about Auster's work saw links between it and the
theories of such French writers as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and others.
Auster himself has denied these influences and has asserted in print that "I've read
only one short essay by Lacan, the "Purloined Letter," in the Yale French Studies
issue on poststructuralism—all the way back in 1966."[17] Other scholars have seen
influences in Auster's work of the American transcendentalists of the nineteenth
century, as exemplified by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The
transcendentalists believed that the symbolic order of civilization has separated us
from the natural order of the world, and that by moving into nature, as Thoreau did,
as he described in Walden, it would be possible to return to this natural order.
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.
Paul Auster's reappearing subjects are:[18]
○ coincidence
○ frequent portrayal of an ascetic life
○ a sense of imminent disaster
○ an obsessive writer as central character or narrator
○ loss of the ability to understand
○ loss of language
○ loss of money – having a lot, but losing it little by little without earning some
new money any more
○ depiction of daily and ordinary life
○ failure[19]
○ absence of a father
○ writing and story telling, metafiction
○ intertextuality
○ American history
○ American space
● Reception
"Over the past twenty-five years," opined Michael Dirda in The New York Review of
Books in 2008, "Paul Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in
contemporary literature."[20] Dirda also has extolled his loaded virtues in The
Washington Post:
Ever since City of Glass, the first volume of his New York Trilogy, Auster has
perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a
seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague
menace and possible hallucination. His plots – drawing on elements from suspense
stories, existential récit, and autobiography – keep readers turning the pages, but
sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through.[21]
Writing about Auster's most recent novel, 4 3 2 1, Booklist critic Donna Seaman
remarked:
Auster has been turning readers' heads for three decades, bending the conventions
of storytelling, blurring the line between fiction and autobiography, infusing novels
with literary and cinematic allusions, and calling attention to the art of storytelling
itself, not with cool, intellectual remove, but rather with wonder, gratitude, daring, and
sly humor. ... Auster's fiction is rife with cosmic riddles and rich in emotional
complexity. He now presents his most capacious, demanding, eventful, suspenseful,
erotic, structurally audacious, funny, and soulful novel to date. ... Auster is conducting
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.
... A paean to youth, desire, books, creativity, and unpredictability, it is a four-faceted
bildungsroman and an ars poetica, in which Auster elucidates his devotion to
literature and art. He writes, 'To combine the strange with the familiar: that was what
Ferguson aspired to, to observe the world as closely as the most dedicated realist
and yet to create a way of seeing the world through a different, slightly distorting
lens.' Auster achieves this and much more in his virtuoso, magnanimous, and
ravishing opus.[22]
The English critic James Wood, however, offered Auster little praise:
Clichés, borrowed language, bourgeois bêtises are intricately bound up with modern
and postmodern literature. For Flaubert, the cliché and the received idea are beasts
to be toyed with and then slain. "Madame Bovary" actually italicizes examples of
foolish or sentimental phrasing. Charles Bovary's conversation is likened to a
pavement, over which many people have walked; twentieth-century literature,
violently conscious of mass culture, extends this idea of the self as a kind of
borrowed tissue, full of other people's germs. Among modern and postmodern
writers, Beckett, Nabokov, Richard Yates, Thomas Bernhard, Muriel Spark, Don
DeLillo, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace have all employed and impaled
cliché in their work. Paul Auster is probably America's best-known postmodern
novelist; his "New York Trilogy" must have been read by thousands who do not
usually read avant-garde fiction. Auster clearly shares this engagement with
mediation and borrowedness—hence, his cinematic plots and rather bogus
dialogue—and yet he does nothing with cliché except use it. This is bewildering, on
its face, but then Auster is a peculiar kind of postmodernist. Or is he a postmodernist
at all? Eighty per cent of a typical Auster novel proceeds in a manner
indistinguishable from American realism; the remaining twenty per cent does a kind
of postmodern surgery on the eighty per cent, often casting doubt on the veracity of
the plot. Nashe, in "The Music of Chance" (1990), sounds as if he had sprung from a
Raymond Carver story (although Carver would have written more interesting prose)
... 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." There are no semantic obstacles, lexical difficulties, or
syntactical challenges. The books fairly hum along. The reason Auster is not a realist
writer, of course, is that his larger narrative games are anti-realist or surrealist.
Wood also bemoaned Auster's 'b-movie dialogue', 'absurdity', 'shallow skepticism',
'fake realism' and 'balsa-wood backstories'. Wood highlighted what he saw as the
issues in Auster's fiction in a parody:
Roger Phaedo had not spoken to anyone for ten years. He confined himself to his
Brooklyn apartment, obsessively translating and retranslating the same short
passage from Rousseau's "Confessions." A decade earlier, a mobster named Charlie
Dark had attacked Phaedo and his wife. Phaedo was beaten to within an inch of his
life; Mary was set on fire, and survived just five days in the I.C.U. By day, Phaedo
translated; at night, he worked on a novel about Charlie Dark, who was never
convicted. Then Phaedo drank himself senseless with Scotch. He drank to drown his
sorrows, to dull his senses, to forget himself. The phone rang, but he never answered
it. Sometimes, Holly Steiner, an attractive woman across the hall, would silently enter
his bedroom, and expertly rouse him from his stupor. At other times, he made use of
the services of Aleesha, a local hooker. Aleesha's eyes were too hard, too cynical,
and they bore the look of someone who had already seen too much. Despite that,
Aleesha had an uncanny resemblance to Holly, as if she were Holly's double. And it
was Aleesha who brought Roger Phaedo back from the darkness. One afternoon,
wandering naked through Phaedo's apartment, she came upon two enormous
manuscripts, neatly stacked. One was the Rousseau translation, each page covered
with almost identical words; the other, the novel about Charlie Dark. She started
leafing through the novel. "Charlie Dark!" she exclaimed. "I knew Charlie Dark! He
was one tough cookie. That bastard was in the Paul Auster gang. I'd love to read this
book, baby, but I'm always too lazy to read long books. Why don't you read it to me?"
And that is how the ten-year silence was broken. Phaedo decided to please Aleesha.
He sat down, and started reading the opening paragraph of his novel, the novel you
have just read.[23]

Auster with John Ashbery at the Brooklyn Book Festival

Personal life
Auster was married to the writer Lydia Davis. They have one son together, Daniel
Auster.[24]
Auster and his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt (the daughter of professor and
scholar Lloyd Hustvedt), were married in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn.[2] Together
they have one daughter, Sophie Auster.[25]
He has said his politics are "far to the left of the Democratic Party" but that he votes
Democratic because he doubts a socialist candidate could win.[26] He has described
right-wing Republicans as "jihadists"[27] and the election of Donald Trump as "the
 most appalling thing I've seen in politics in my life."[28]
Awards
○ 1989 Prix France Culture de Littérature Étrangère for The New York Trilogy
○ 1990 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters
○ 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction finalist for The Music of Chance
○ 1993 Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan
○ 1996 Bodil Awards – Best American Film: Smoke
○ 1996 Independent Spirit Award – Best First Screenplay: Smoke
○ 1996 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence
○ 2001 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Timbuktu
○ 2003 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences[29]
○ 2004 International Dublin Literary Award shortlist for The Book of Illusions
○ 2005 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Oracle Night
○ 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature
○ 2006 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Literature
○ 2007 Honorary doctor from the University of Liège
○ 2007 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for The Brooklyn Follies
○ 2007 Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres[30]
○ 2008 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Travels in the Scriptorium
○ 2009 Premio Leteo (León, Spain).
○ 2010 Médaille Grand Vermeil de la ville de Paris[31]
○ 2010 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Man in the Dark
○ 2011 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Invisible
○ 2012 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Sunset Park
○ 2012 NYC Literary Honors for fiction[32]
○ 2017 Booker Prize Shortlist for "4321"[33]
● Published works
FictionSqueeze Play (1984) (Written under pseudonym Paul Benjamin)
● The New York Trilogy (1987)
○ City of Glass (1985)
○ Ghosts (1986)
○ The Locked Room (1986)
● In the Country of Last Things (1987)
● Moon Palace (1989)
● The Music of Chance (1990)
● Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (1990)
● Leviathan (1992)
● Mr. Vertigo (1994)
● Timbuktu (1999)