Prolific and inventive author, filmmaker
• Paul Auster, a prolific, prize-winning man of letters and filmmaker known for such inventive narratives and meta-narratives as The New York Trilogy and 4 3 2 1, has died at age 77.
Auster’s death was confirmed Wednesday by his literary representatives, the Carol Mann Agency, which did not immediately provide additional details. Auster had been diagnosed with cancer in 2022.
Starting in the 1970s, Auster completed more than 30 books, translated into dozens of languages. A longtime fixture in the Brooklyn literary scene, he never achieved major commercial success in the U.S., but he was widely admired overseas for his cosmopolitan world view and erudite and introspective style and was named a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1991. He was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Called the “dean of American postmodernists” and “the most meta of American metafictional writers,” Auster blended history, politics, genre experiments, existential quests and self-conscious references to writers and writing. The New York Trilogy, which included City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room, was a post-modern detective saga in which names and identities blur and one protagonist is a private eye named Paul Auster.
The author’s longest and most ambitious work of fiction was 4 3 2 1, published in 2017 and a Booker finalist.
His other works included the non-fiction compilations Groundwork and Talking to Strangers; a family memoir, The Invention of Solitude; a biography of novelist Stephen Crane; the novels Leviathan and Talking to Strangers and the poetry collection White Space.
Auster was so much the old-fashioned author that he worked on a typewriter and disdained email and other forms of electronic communication. But he did have an unusually active film career compared to his writing peers.
In the mid-1990s, Auster collaborated with director Wayne Wang on the acclaimed art-house film Smoke, an adaptation of Auster’s humorous story about a Brooklyn cigar shop and a certain customer named Paul. The film starred Harvey Keitel, Stockard Channing and William Hurt among others and brought Auster an Independent Spirit Award for best first screenplay.