Paul Auster, the author of 34 books including the famous ‘New York Trilogy’, which has become a classic of contemporary American literature, has died at the age of 77. The author, considered a protagonist of postmodernism in literature, was also an essayist, poet, screenwriter, director, actor and film producer. He passed away due to complications from lung cancer.
Video American writer Paul Auster has died
He was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. According to Auster, his writing life began at the age of eight, when he missed an opportunity to get an autograph from his baseball hero, Willie Mays, because neither he nor his his parents had brought a pencil to the game. Since then, he always carried a pencil with him. “If there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it,” he reportedly wrote in a 1995 essay.
He had studied at Columbia University before moving to Paris in the early 1970s, where he worked in various fields, including translation, living with his girlfriend, the writer Lydia Davis. In 1974, the two returned to the United States and married. In 1977, the couple had a son, Daniel, but separated shortly after. In January 1979, Auster’s father Samuel died, and the event became the seed of the writer’s first memoir, ‘The Invention of Solitude’, published in 1982.
Auster’s turning point came with the publication in 1985 of ‘City of Glass’, the first novel of his ‘New York Trilogy’, a triptych where the mystery becomes the pretext to explore existential questions. An investigation, like that on the causality of life events, which would accompany him in many of his works. His success in literature was also confirmed as the author of films such as ‘Smoke’, ‘Blue in the Face’ and ‘Lulu on the bridge’ (of which he was also director). His latest novel, ‘Baumgartner’, was released in Italy by Einaudi in 2023.
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