‘America has lost a noble soul’: author Paul Auster dies at 77

Paul Auster at his home in Brooklyn, New York, in 2006

PHOTOGRAPH: TIMOTHY FADEK/ CORBIS/GETTY

Paul Auster, the author of 34 books including The New York Trilogy, has died aged 77. 

‘His narrative voice is as hypnotic as that of the Ancient Mariner’

   - Michael Dirda, Critic

2 May 2024 - The Guardian

Ella Creamer

The author died yesterday from complications linked to lung cancer, his friend and fellow author Jacki Lyden confirmed to the Guardian.

Auster became known for his “highly stylised, quirkily riddlesome postmodernist fiction in which narrators are rarely other than unreliable and the bedrock of plot is continually shifting”, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote in 2010.

His stories often play with themes of coincidence, chance and fate. Many of his protagonists are writers, and his body of work is self-referential, with characters from early novels appearing again in later ones.

“Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature,” the critic Michael Dirda wrote in 2008. “His narrative voice is as hypnotic as that of the Ancient Mariner. Start one of his books and by page two you cannot choose but hear.”

The author was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. He said his writing life began at the age of eight when he missed out on an autograph from his baseball hero, Willie Mays, because neither he nor his parents had taken a pencil to the game. From then on, he took a pencil everywhere. “If there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it,” he wrote in 1995 .

During a summer camp aged 14, Auster witnessed a boy inches away from him getting struck by lightning and dying instantly – an event he said had “absolutely changed” his life and which he thought about “every day”. Chance, “understandably, became a recurring theme in his fiction,” wrote the critic Laura Miller in 2017.

A similar incident occurs in Auster’s 2017 Booker-shortlisted novel 4 3 2 1: one of the book’s four versions of the protagonist, Archie Ferguson, runs under a tree at a summer camp and is killed by a falling branch when lightning strikes.

Auster studied at Columbia University before moving to Paris in the early 1970s, where he did a variety of jobs, including translation, and lived with his “on-again off-again” girlfriend, the writer Lydia Davis, whom he had met at college. In 1974, they returned to the US and married. In 1977, the couple had a son, Daniel, but separated shortly afterwards.

In January 1979, Auster’s father, Samuel, died, and the event became the seed for the writer’s first memoir, The Invention of Solitude, published in 1982. In it, Auster revealed that his paternal grandfather was shot and killed by his grandmother, who was acquitted on grounds of insanity. “A boy cannot live through this kind of thing without being affected by it as a man,” Auster wrote in reference to his father, with whom he described himself having an “un-movable relationship, cut off from each other on opposite sides of a wall”.

Auster’s breakthrough came with the 1985 publication of City of Glass, the first novel in the trilogy. While the books are ostensibly mystery stories, Auster wielded the form to ask existential questions. “The more [Auster’s detectives] stalk their eccentric quarry, the more they seem actually to be stalking the Big Questions – the implications of authorship, the enigmas of epistemology, the veils and masks of language,” wrote the critic Stephen Schiff in 1987.

Auster published regularly throughout the 80s, 90s and 00s, writing more than a dozen novels. He also became involved in film, writing the screenplay for Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang, for which he won the Independent Spirit award for best first screenplay in 1995.

In 1981, Auster met the writer Siri Hustvedt and they married the following year. In 1987 they had a daughter, Sophie, who became a singer and actor. Auster’s 1992 novel Leviathan, about a man who accidentally blows himself up, features a character called Iris Vegan, who is the heroine of Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold.

The author and associate editor of the Observer, Robert McCrum, wrote: “America and the world has lost a passionate, gentle, wise, and noble soul, a literary voice for the ages.”

The Irish novelist Colum McCann wrote: “One of the beauties of literature is that it remains with us even beyond death, and the thing we can celebrate is that we will have Paul’s words still speaking to us down through those years yet to come.”

Auster was better known in Europe than in his native US: “Merely a bestselling author in these parts,” read a 2007 New York magazine article, “Auster is a rock star in Paris.” In 2006, he was awarded Spain’s Prince of Asturias prize for literature, and in 1993 he was given the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan. He was also a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

In April 2022, Auster and Davis’s son, Daniel, died from a drug overdose. Auster is survived by Hustvedt, their daughter, Sophie Auster, his sister Janet Auster, and a grandson.