Paul B. Auster ’69, GSAS’70, Novelist, Memoirist and Screenwriter

Paul B. Auster ’69, GSAS’70, the prolific, Brooklyn-based author who rose to fame with the critically acclaimed New York Trilogy of novels in the 1980s and who became one of the leading postmodern American writers of his generation, died on April 30, 2024, in his adopted borough. He was 77.

The Economist called him “the Bard of Brooklyn.” The New York Times called him “the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn.” Though he was born and raised in New Jersey and lived for a brief period in Paris, Auster settled in the tree-lined neighborhood of Park Slope in the 1980s and never left.

Auster wrote 34 books, including 18 novels. He also was a poet, memoirist, essayist, screenwriter and film director who often used New York City as a backdrop for stories of characters struggling to make sense of life’s random chaos.

“He was a really exciting and compelling voice of his generation,” said Alys Moody, an associate professor of literature at Bard College whose areas of expertise include 20th- and 21st-century European, American and world literature. “Auster will be remembered for being one of the leading figures in a post-modern tradition that’s reimagining how central language is, and how central writing is, and how central above all storytelling is.”

Born on February 3, 1947, in Newark, N.J., Auster grew up in South Orange and nearby Maplewood. He wrote that his home was not a happy one and his relationship with his father was strained, and that he found refuge in baseball, a lifelong passion, as well as books. He cited two very different publications, Mad magazine and a six-volume collection of books by Robert Louis Stevenson, as helping to shape his early life.

Another influence, and what would become a recurring theme of his work — how a single, chance moment can change everything — came from an incident at summer camp when Auster was 14. A lightning bolt killed one of the boys in his group as they were caught in a sudden storm. “I’ve always been haunted by what happened, the utter randomness of it,” he said. “I think it was the most important day of my life.”

At Columbia, Auster participated in the student demonstrations of Spring 1968 and spent a semester abroad in Paris before graduating with a B.A. in 1969 and an M.A. a year later, both in English and comparative literature. He worked on an oil tanker and moved to Paris, where he paid the bills by translating French literature while starting to publish his own work in literary journals. He published his first book, a collection of translations called A Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems, in 1972, and a well-received memoir, The Invention of Solitude, in 1982.

After returning to the United States in the mid-1970s, Auster worked various jobs before a random event in 1980 led to his first novel. “I was living alone in Brooklyn and I received a telephone call,” he recalled. “The person on the other end asked if he had reached the Pinkerton Agency. And, of course, I said no and hung up. But after the second or third time, I said, well, what if I said ‘Yes’? And that was the genesis of the novel.”

City of Glass, published in 1985, combined hard-boiled detective fiction with existential inquiry and featured a character named Paul Auster. It and its 1986 follow-ups, Ghosts and The Locked Room, made up the New York Trilogy, which was published in a single volume the following year.

Auster quickly became a fixture of the growing Brooklyn literary scene. Referred to by literary critics as “the dean of American postmodernists” and “the most meta of American meta-fictional writers,” he wrote fiction that hinged on reality but also challenged the definition of it.

As Auster put it in A Life in Words (2017), “Most writers are perfectly satisfied with traditional literary models and happy to produce works they feel are beautiful and true and good … I’m also interested in inventing new ways to tell stories. I wanted to turn everything inside out.”

His output was prolific. Among Auster’s best-known novels of the next two decades were Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), Leviathan (1992), Mr. Vertigo (1994), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012) and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His latest novel, Baumgartner, was published last year.

Auster also ventured into screenwriting. He embellished one of his short stories into Smoke (1995), which starred Harvey Keitel, William Hurt and Giancarlo Esposito. The film won him the Independent Spirit Award for first screenplay. He paired with Smoke director Wayne Wang later that year and they co-directed a sequel, Blue in the Face, which brought back Keitel and Esposito and also starred Lou Reed, Mira Sorvino and Madonna.

He wrote and directed the 1998 mystery drama Lulu on the Bridge, which again starred Keitel and Sorvino and was nominated for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes International Film Festival. He wrote and directed the 2007 comedy The Inner Life of Martin Frost, which explored the art of writing and starred David Thewlis, Irène Jacob and Michael Imperioli.

Auster, whose books have been translated into more than 40 languages, achieved critical acclaim and some commercial success in the United States, but he was deeply admired abroad. “The first thing you hear as you approach an Auster reading, anywhere in the world, is French,” New York magazine wrote in 2007. “Merely a best-selling author in these parts, Auster is a rock star in Paris.”

He was awarded several prizes during his prolific career, including the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, the Prix Médicis étranger, an Independent Spirit Award and the Premio Napoli. He also was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Auster received certificates from CUNY Brooklyn College and Williams College, and in 2012 he was given GSAS’s Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement.

Auster is survived by his wife, fellow author Siri E. Hustvedt GSAS’86, and daughter, Sophie, a singer/songwriter and actress. He was predeceased in 2022 by his son, Daniel, from an earlier marriage to Lydia Davis.

— Alex Sachare ’71