Paul Auster, Prolific Author and Brooklyn Literary Star, Dies at 77
With critically lauded works like “The New York Trilogy,” the charismatic author and patron saint of his adopted borough drew worldwide acclaim.
Published April 30, 2024Updated May 1, 2024, 12:28 a.m. ET
Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77.
His death was confirmed by a friend, Jacki Lyden.
With his hooded eyes, soulful air and leading-man looks, Mr. Auster was often described as a “literary superstar” in news accounts. The Times Literary Supplement of Britain once called him “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.”
Though a New Jersey native, he became indelibly linked with the rhythms of his adopted city, which was a character of sorts in much of his work — particularly Brooklyn, where he settled in 1980 amid the oak-lined streets of brownstones in the Park Slope neighborhood.
As his reputation grew, Mr. Auster came to be seen as a guardian of Brooklyn’s rich literary past, as well as an inspiration to a new generation of novelists who flocked to the borough in the 1990s and later.
“Paul Auster was the Brooklyn novelist back in the ’80s and ’90s, when I was growing up there, at a time when very few famous writers lived in the borough,” the author and poet Meghan O’Rourke, who was raised in nearby Prospect Heights, wrote in an email. “His books were on all my parents’ friends’ shelves. As teenagers, my friends and I read Auster’s work avidly for both its strangeness — that touch of European surrealism — and its closeness.
“Long before ‘Brooklyn’ became a place where every novelist seemed to live, from Colson Whitehead to Jhumpa Lahiri,” she added, “Auster made being a writer seem like something real, something a person actually did.”
His reputation was anything but local, however. He took home several literary prizes in France alone. Like Woody Allen and Mickey Rourke, Mr. Auster, who had lived in Paris as a young man, became one of those rare American imports to be embraced by the French as a native son.
“The first thing you hear as you approach an Auster reading, anywhere in the world, is French,” New York magazine observed in 2007. “Merely a best-selling author in these parts, Auster is a rock star in Paris.”
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In Britain, his 2017 novel, “4321,” which examined four parallel versions of the early life of its protagonist — as Mr. Auster was, a Jewish boy born in Newark in 1947 — was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
His career began to take flight in 1982, with his memoir “The Invention of Solitude,” a haunting rumination on his distant relationship with his recently deceased father. His first novel, “City of Glass,” was rejected by 17 publishers before it was published by a small press in California in 1985.
The book became the first installment in his most celebrated work, “The New York Trilogy,” three novels later packaged in a single volume. It was listed as one of the 25 most significant New York City novels of the last 100 years in a roundup in T, the style magazine published by The New York Times.
