Celebrated author Paul Auster dies at 77

Auster was best known for his ’New York Trilogy’ of metaphysical mysteries

American author Paul Auster who made his name with noirish, existentialist novels about lonely writers, outsiders and down-and-outers that were a huge hit in Europe particularly, has died aged 77.

The author with the soulful, sunken eyes gained cult status in the 1980s and 1990s with his “New York Trilogy” of metaphysical mysteries and his hip film Smoke, about the lost souls who patronise a Brooklyn tobacco shop. In March 2023, his wife, fellow author Hustvedt, announced he had been diagnosed with cancer.

Auster’s work straddles the divide between the middlebrow and the highbrow. His more than 30 books are as likely to be found in airports as on university reading lists and have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Auster grew up in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Jewish Polish immigrants. He moved to New York to attend Columbia University and after graduating spent four years in France, where he lived from translations while honing his craft as a writer.

The turning point came with the sudden death of his father, which spurred Auster to write The Invention of Solitude, a haunting reflection on father-son relationships, a recurring theme in Auster’s work. Published in 1982 it was a critical success and set Auster free with his writing. The same year he married Hustvedt, forming one of New York’s starriest intellectual couples.

His big breakthrough came with “The New York Trilogy”, a philosophical twist on the detective genre featuring a shady quartet of private investigators named Blue, Brown, Black and White. That period also brought a downbeat dog tasked with getting his dead owner’s unpublished manuscript out of a bus station’s luggage locker in Timbuktu (1999) and a series of existential capers: Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990) and Leviathan (1992).

In 2017 he broke with his concise style to deliver a 866-page tome, 4321 , charting American society through the life of an everyman, Archie Ferguson. Auster presented it as his masterwork. But while America’s National Public Radio found it “dazzling”, others were less positive. The Irish Times deemed it “the last fat novel of a collapsed American pride”.

Bloodbath Nation—the book he brought out in January 2023 with his photographer son-in-law Spencer Ostrander about gun violence in America—took him into new terrain. Auster penned the text to accompany Ostrander’s haunting black-and-white pictures from the sites of 30 mass shootings.

A century on, Auster faced his own private anguish. In 2021, his son Daniel was found guilty of negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month-old daughter Ruby from an overdose. The following year, Daniel died of an overdose at the age of 44. Auster never publicly discussed their deaths.

Auster’s work straddles the divide between the middlebrow and the highbrow