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Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947, Newark, New Jersey) is a Brooklyn based author and is regarded by many critics as one of America's greatest living writers. He is probably most famous for the novel The New York Trilogy.

He is also a translator, poet, editor, contributor, script writer and more recently film director.

Biography

Paul Auster was born to middle class parents by the name of Samuel and Queenie. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to France where he lived translating for French writers. Since returning to America in 1974, he has published his own poems, essays, novels and translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

He married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, in 1981. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. He is the father of Daniel and Sophie.

He is also the Vice-President of PEN American Center.

Writing

Auster's first novel was a detective novel called Squeeze Play and was written under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin (Benjamin is his middle name).

Auster gained renown for a series of three experimental detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy (1987). These books 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, creating his own distinctively postmodern form in the process. The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications.

Later Auster's works concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Leviathan). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger than life schemes. Paul Auster is regarded by many critics as one of America's greatest living writers.

B.R. Myers attacked Auster in "A Reader's Manifesto."

He has been awarded with the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, received in previous years by Günter Grass, Arthur Miller and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Published works

Fiction

Poetry

  • Disappearances: Selected Poems (1988)''
  • Ground Work (1990)
  • Selected Poems (1998)
  • Collected Poems (2004)

Screenplays

Essays, memoirs, and autobiographies

Edited collections

  • True Tales of American Life (2001)
  • I Thought My Father was God (2001)

Translations

Misc

Other media

On the album As Smart as We Are by New York band One Ring Zero, Auster wrote the lyrics for the song "Natty Man Blues" based on Cincinnati poet Norman Finkelstein.

In 1993, a movie adaptation of The Music of Chance was released.

Michael Mantler's album Hide and Seek uses words by Auster from the play of the same name.

Paul Auster's voice can 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".

In 2006 Paul Auster directed the film The Inner Life of Martin Frost. It was shot in Lisbon in Portugal and starred his daughter Sophie Auster as the character Anna James.

External links

1947 births | Living people | American novelists | American poets | American essayists | American screenwriters | Columbia University alumni | American translators | Jewish American writers | Newarkers | Members of The American Academy of Arts and Letters | New York writers

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