Paul Auster (1947-2024)
Author Paul Auster, 77, died April 30, 2024 of lung cancer at home in Brooklyn NY. Auster wrote more than 30 books, inluding literary novels and non-fiction, and occasionally incorporated surreal and genre elements in his fiction.
Paul Benjamin Auster was born February 3, 1947 in Newark NJ. He attended Columbia University, graduating with bachelor’s and master’s degrees before moving to Paris in 1970, where he worked as a translator. He returned to the US in 1974, where he became a prolific author of poetry, non-fiction, novels, and works in translation.
His debut work was memoir The Invention of Solitude (1982), and he achieved acclaim with his New York Trilogy, a postmodern take on detective fiction: City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986). Other works of genre interest include Moon Palace (1989), In the Country of Last Things (1987), The Music of Chance (1990), Leviathan (1992), Mr. Vertigo (1994), Timbuktu (1999), The Book of Illusions (2002), Oracle Night (2003), Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), Man in the Dark (2008), and Booker Award finalist 4 3 2 1 (2017).
Auster was diagnosed with cancer in 2023. He and first wife Lydia Davis had one son, who predeceased him. He is survived by second wife Siri Hustvedt (married 1981) and their daughter.
For more, see his entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
