1. Paul Benjamin Auster was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker.
23 Facts About Paul Auster
1. 2.
Paul Auster's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
3.
Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, son of Samuel Auster, a landlord who owned buildings with his brothers in Jersey City, and Queenie, nee Bogat.
4.
Paul Auster's middle-class parents were Jewish, of Austrian descent; the marriage was an unhappy one, and they divorced during Auster's senior year of high school, he moving with his mother and sister to an apartment at Weequahic, Newark.
5.
Paul Auster grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, and Newark, and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood.
6.
Rather, Paul Auster uses the detective form to address questions of identity, space, language, and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern form in the process.
7.
Paul Auster disagrees with this analysis, because he believes that "the Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude".
8.
Similar to the themes explored in The New York Trilogy, the search for identity and personal meaning continued to permeate the three novels Paul Auster published in quick succession in the late 1980s.
9.
Whether writing about the relationships between people caught in the flux of an uncertain future and uncertain identity, or the role of coincidence and random events in our lives, Paul Auster was steadily increasing his readership and popularity.
10.
Paul Auster directed the movie Lulu on the Bridge.
11.
Between 2002 and 2024, Paul Auster published nine novels, two memoirs, an 800-page biography of Stephen Crane, and a sustained jeremiad on the long, unending history of gun violence in America.
12.
Eight of the final ten novels Paul Auster published during his lifetime received nominations for the International Dublin Award, and Paul Auster's 2017 novel 4 3 2 1 was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
13.
Paul Auster was on the PEN American Center board of trustees from 2004 to 2009 and its vice president from 2005 through 2007.
14.
In 2012, Paul Auster said in an interview that he would not visit Turkey, in protest at its treatment of journalists.
15.
Paul Auster was willing to give Iranian translators permission to write Persian versions of his works in exchange for a small fee; Iran does not recognize international copyright laws.
16.
Dirda extolled his virtues in The Washington Post, attesting that Paul Auster had "perfected a limpid, confessional style" and constructed suspenseful, sometimes autobiographical plots.
17.
In 1981, Paul Auster married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, the daughter of professor and scholar Lloyd Hustvedt.
18.
Daniel Paul Auster was arrested on April 16,2022, and charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month-old infant daughter Ruby, who consumed some of the heroin and fentanyl he was using.
19.
Daniel Paul Auster was known for his association with the Club Kids and their ringleader Michael Alig, and was present during the killing of fellow Club Kid Andre Melendez.
20.
Paul Auster characterized his politics as "far to the left of the Democratic Party", but said he voted Democratic because he doubted a socialist candidate could win.
21.
Paul Auster described right-wing Republicans as "jihadists", and the election of Donald Trump as "the most appalling thing I've seen in politics in my life".
22.
Paul Auster died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn, on April 30,2024, at the age of 77.
23.
Paul Auster was survived by his wife Siri Hustvedt, their daughter Sophie Auster, his sister Janet Auster, and a grandson.