Writer paul auster biography

Paul Auster, who has died at the age of 77, grew up in New Jersey in the post-war years of the 1950s, where a bookless household laid the foundations for his obsessional focus on human behaviour and the complexities of the shifting world.

As “a young Jew in New York” with a voracious appetite for literature and a fascination with writing, Auster attended Columbia University, where he studied English Literature, influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Samuel Beckett.

In 1982, Auster planted himself on the literary scene with The New York Trilogy – a genre-bending work that deftly merges elements of hard-boiled detective fiction with an effortless postmodernist style via a classically Austerian lens of existentialism and angst.

City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room – three connected novellas – engross readers with deliciously complex plotlines, enigmatic characters and philosophical thoughts on language and identity. The New York Trilogy established Auster