Profile of Paul Auster on Famous Like Me

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American author. He is married to fellow writer Siri Hustvedt.

Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to France. Since returning to America in 1974, he has published his own poems, essays, novels and translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

Auster is the Vice-President of PEN American Center.

His first novel was a detective novel called Squeeze Play and was written under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin (Benjamin is his middle name).

Auster gained renown for a series of three experimental detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy (1987). These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, creating his own, distinctively postmodern form in the process. The search for identity and personal meaning has been a red thread between all of Auster's later publications.

Later Auster works concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Leviathan). Through his rich and unexpectedly dream-like prose, Paul Auster is widely regarded by critics as one of America's greatest living writers.

B.R. Myers attacked Auster in "A Reader's Manifesto."

Published works

Fiction

• The New York Trilogy (1987) (including City of Glass, 1985; Ghosts, 1986 and The Locked Room, 1986)
• In The Country of Last Things (1987)
• Moon Palace (1989)
• The Music of Chance (1990)
• Leviathan (1992)
• Mr Vertigo (1994)
• Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (1992)
• Timbuktu (1999)
• The Book of Illusions (2002)
• Oracle Night (2004)
• Brooklyn Follies (2005)

Poetry

• Ground Work (1990)
• Disappearances: Selected Poems

Film

• The Music of Chance
• Smoke (1995)
• Blue in the Face
• Lulu on the Bridge

Biography (Non-fiction ???)

• The Art of Hunger (1982)
• The Red Notebook
• The Invention of Solitude (1982)
• Hand To Mouth (1997)

Misc

• Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1998) (translation of Pierre Clastres' ethnography Chronique des indiens Guayaki)
• The Story of My Typewriter (2002)
• As Smart as We Are by New York band One Ring Zero. Auster wrote the lyrics for Natty Man Blues.

Edited collection

"True Tales of American Life" (2001)

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