American writer and poet Paul Auster died at the age of seventy-seven, local time Tuesday evening, MTI reports. Considered one of the most important contemporary American writers, Auster struggled with lung cancer and died of its complications.
Considered one of New York’s literary stars, the writer of Jewish origin wrote more than thirty books during his life, and his works were translated into more than forty languages, including most of them into Hungarian. Auster lived in Paris between 1971 and 1975, during which time he also translated poems by French poets into English. He became famous in 1982 with his autobiographical novel The Invention of Loneliness. He also worked as a screenwriter, among others he wrote the screenplay for the film Smoke directed by Wayne Wang. He finished his last book, Baumgartner, in the midst of his battle with cancer.
Paul Auster initially started out as a poet, but according to Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, he decided to become a writer instead. He studied English and comparative literature at Columbia University. In the seventies, he spent a lot of time in Paris, where he met Samuel Beckett, who also had a great influence on him. During these years Auster worked as a translator and English teacher in Paris.
He returned to the United States in 1974 and taught at Columbia University, translating works by French authors into English as a part-time job. In 1978, he published his detective novel Squeeze Play under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin, after which his father’s inheritance allowed him to devote his time to writing. He also commemorated his father in his first successful book (The Invention of Solitude, 1982).
For the writer, the New York trilogy, published in 1987, brought him international fame, and this strange postmodern detective novel is still considered his most significant work. Another outstanding piece of his oeuvre is the novel 4 3 2 1, published in 2017, in which Auster tells the life story of a writer in four versions.
Paul Auster is also one of the greatest authors of contemporary American literature, because in his books he built an understandable, yet completely unique world in which fiction is peculiarly mixed with real events, we wrote about him in our previous article. Auster told the Guardian in mid-November that Baumgartner might be the last book he wrote due to his uncertain health.
His first wife was writer and translator Lydia Davis, their son Daniel was born in 1978. In 1982, he married fellow writer Siri Hustvedt, and their daughter, Sophie, was born in 1987. In 2022 in the writer’s family there were two tragedies: his ten-month-old grandson died after he ingested heroin from the stash of his drug-addicted father, Daniel Auster, and two weeks later, the writer’s son, Daniel, also died of an overdose.
Paul Auster died at his home in Brooklyn, surrounded by loved ones.
