Paul Auster

Paul Auster (1947- ), American novelist, short-story writer, and poet, whose fiction is characterized by an often unnerving blend of realism and fantasy, the normal and incredible, which surprises the reader and confounds expectations.

Paul Auster was born on February 3, 1947, in Newark, New Jersey, and educated at Columbia High School and Columbia University. Following a brief period as a merchant seaman, he went to live in France, where he worked as a translator. He returned to New York four years later, in 1974. Auster began his writing career producing poetry and essays for the New York Review of Books and Harper’s Saturday Review, and published his first book in 1982, the memoir The Invention of Solitude. In 1987 he won critical acclaim for his collection of short stories, The New York Trilogy. He then turned to novel writing. In the Country of Last Things was published in 1988, Moon Palace in 1989, and The Music of Chance in 1991; the latter was also made into a film in 1993 by the director Philip Haas. Auster’s later novels from the 1990s include Leviathan (1992), Mr Vertigo (1994), The Red Notebook (1995), and Timbuktu (1999), a story written from the viewpoint of a dog.

Paul Auster collaborated on two film projects with the Chinese-American director Wayne Wang, adapting his own short story Augie Wren’s Christmas Story for the film Smoke (1995) and co-directing its improvised companion piece Blue in the Face (1995); he also wrote and directed the film Lulu on the Bridge (1998). Other published works by Auster include the autobiographical Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (1997), a collection of poems and essays, Groundwork (1990), and his Collected Prose (2003). In 2001 he edited True Tales of American Life, a compendium of stories submitted by American radio listeners.

Among Auster’s subsequent novels are The Book of Illusions (2002), exploring the familiar Auster themes of chance and coincidence; the multi-layered mystery Oracle Night (2003); and The Brooklyn Follies (2005), in which a retired insurance man diagnosed with lung cancer is rejuvenated when he returns to his native Brooklyn.