Renowned Brooklyn writer Paul Auster died at his home Tuesday evening from complications related to lung cancer. He was 77.
Auster was primarily known for “The New York Trilogy” — “City of Glass,” “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room” — a set of self-referential, postmodern mystery novellas he published in the 1980s that turned him into a literary star.
Born in Newark in 1947, Auster began writing when he was a child after missing out on a chance to get an autograph from baseball star Willie Mays while attending a game at the Polo Grounds. He vowed to always have a pencil so as to never miss a chance like that again.
“It’s not that I had any particular plans for that pencil, but I didn’t want to be unprepared,” he wrote in a New Yorker essay. “I had been caught empty-handed once, and I wasn’t about to let it happen again. If nothing else, the years have taught me this: if there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it.”
He grew up in South Orange and Maplewood before enrolling In Columbia University, where he joined the 1968 student uprising at the Ivy League school.
“I had just turned 21, and I was as crazy as everyone else,” he reflected in 2008.
“There were half a million American soldiers in Vietnam, Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, cities were burning across America, and the world seemed headed for an apocalyptic breakdown.”
“Being crazy struck me as a perfectly sane response to the hand I had been dealt.”
In a bit of happenstance, he died the same night the NYPD arrested more than 200 protesters at Columbia after they occupied Hamilton Hall on the Morningside Heights campus.
After getting a bachelor’s and master’s in in comparative literature, he lived in Paris for a time where he considered attending film school while publishing his first writings. His work would eventually win several awards in France.
He returned to the city in the mid-70s and headed south, settling in Park Slope and inspiring several other generations of writers to flock to the borough. He wrote a number of novels and memoirs in this time, including “The Invention of Solitude,” “Moon Palace” and “Leviathan.”
He also wrote films, including “Smoke,” a slice of life anthology film about the denizens of a Park Slope tobacco shop, starring Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Ashley Judd and Forrest Whitaker. He also wrote and directed “Lulu on the Bridge” with Keitel and Mira Sorvino.
Auster remained prolific, publishing multiple books in his later years, including “4 3 2 1,” which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. He penned a biography of “Red Badge of Courage” author Stephen Crane in 2021. Last year, he published a nonfiction book about American gun violence and his final novel, “Baumgartner.”
Auster wrote 34 books in total.
The author is survived by his wife, writer Siri Hustvedt; daughter Sophie Auster; sister Janet Auster; and grandson Miles. He is preceded in death by Daniel Auster, his son from his first marriage to writer Lydia Davis. Daniel died from a drug overdose in 2022 after he was charged with criminally negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month-old daughter, Ruby.
