4321 (Auster) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—February 3, 1947
• Where—Newark, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York


Paul Benjamin Auster is an American writer and director whose writing blends absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, and the search for identity and personal meaning. Those modes can be found in The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), and most recently 4321 (2017). Auster's books have been translated into more than forty languages.

Early life
Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle-class parents of Polish descent: Queenie (nee Bogat) and Samuel Auster. He grew up in Newark and South Orange and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood, all in New Jersey.

Career
After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris where he earned a living translating French literature. After returning to the U.S. in 1974, he began to publish poems, essays, and eventually novels of his own, as well as continuing to translate French writers, such as Stephane Mallarme and Joseph Joubert.

Following his well regarded debut, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude (1982), Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy (1987). Instead of conventional detective stories organized around a mystery, Auster takes on existential issues and questions of identity, space, language, and literature. In the process, he creates his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernism) form. Comparing the two works, Auster said,

I believe the world is filled with strange events. Reality is a great deal more mysterious than we ever give it credit for. In that sense, [Manhattan] Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude.

The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance, 1990) or increasingly, the relationships between people and their peers and environment (Moon Palace, 1989; The Book of Illusions, 2002).

Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. His more recent works—Oracle Night (2003), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), the novella Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), and 4321 (2017)—have been met with critical acclaim.

Work with PEN
In addition to being a PEN-Faulkner winner, Auster served on the PEN American Center Board of Trustees, from 2004-2009, and as Vice President from 2005-2007.

In a 2012 interview, Auster announced his refusal to visit Turkey in protest over the country's treatment of journalists. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan retorted: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come or not?" Auster then pointed out that...

According to the latest numbers gathered by International PEN, there are nearly one hundred writers imprisoned in Turkey, not to speak of independent publishers such as Ragip Zarakolu, whose case is being closely watched by PEN Centers around the world.

Reception
In a 2003 Washington Post article, Michael Dirda, French critical theorist, praised Auster's "limpid, confessional style," and his penchant for placing his heroes in a world of...

...mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots...keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through.

In a 2008 issue of The New York Review of Books, Dirda wrote that Auster had "established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature."

James Wood of The New Yorker, has been less effusive in his praise for Auster. In a 2009 issue of the magazine, Wood wrote:

Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves.... Because nothing is persuasively assembled...one [is left] largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.)

Cultural historian Morris Berman believes that while Americans concern themselves with Auster's literary qualities, Europeans find his view of American society far more stirring:

[T]he theme of Paul Auster’s novels is that American society is incoherent, that it lacks a true identity.... [B]y and large Americans don’t...don’t read him. [But] Auster is tremendously popular in Europe, he’s been translated into more than twenty languages: those are the bulk of his sales. Americans are not interested in this kind of perception.

Personal life
Auster was married to the writer Lydia Davis. They have one son together, Daniel Auster. In 1981, he married writer Siri Hustvedt (the daughter of professor and scholar Lloyd Hustvedt), and the two live in Brooklyn. Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster.

Recognition
Auster has won more than 20 literary awards, prizes, and honors from the U.S. (8), Ireland (8), France (4), Spain (2), and Belgium (1). Included among them are film awards, his election to the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a fellowship, and an honorary doctorate. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/7/2017.)