Paul Auster
American literature in the latter decades of the twentieth century saw a surge of writers who pushed against the boundaries of realism, playing with identity, chance, and the mechanics of storytelling itself. Paul Auster was one of the more restless figures working in that space, bringing to it a range of roles that few of his contemporaries matched.
Born in Newark on February 3, 1947, Auster was educated at Columbia High School and Columbia University. He worked in English and French, and his career spanned an unusually wide set of disciplines: he was a novelist, poet, essayist, autobiographer, playwright, librettist, screenwriter, film director, translator, editor, critic, and university teacher. That breadth was more than a résumé curiosity — it meant that the concerns running through his fiction also surfaced in his poetry, his essays, and his work behind a camera. His notable novels include The New York Trilogy, The Book of Illusions, Leviathan, and Man in the Dark, titles that together trace a long arc across his writing life from the 1980s into the 2000s.
The international dimension of Auster's work was reflected in the recognition he received abroad, particularly in France. He was named Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and he received the Prix Médicis étranger, the Prix France-Culture de littérature étrangère, and the Lucien Barrière Literary Award. An honorary doctorate from the University of Liège added a further European credential. His standing was not confined to one continent, however: he also received the Princess of Asturias Literary Prize, awarded in Spain, and in the United States he earned the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Auster died in New York City on April 30, 2024, at the age of seventy-seven. Among the formal honors that marked his career, the Princess of Asturias Literary Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award stand as two of the more concrete measures of how his work was received on either side of the Atlantic.
Quotes by Paul Auster
Paul Auster's insights on:
Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, where as you can watch a film-and even enjoy it-in a state of mindless passivity.
There is a double rhythm in all human beings. We are binary beings – two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears. Two legs for walking. And the heartbeat thumping in our chest mirrors that.
How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesn't believe that, about other possibilities?
The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.
Anything was possible, and just because things happened in one way didn’t mean they couldn’ t happen in another.
On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.
It was filled with books. That was the first thing I noticed when I went in – how many books there were. Three of the four walls were lined with shelves from the floor to the ceiling, and every inch of those shelves was crammed with books. There were further clusters and piles of them on chairs and tables, on the rug, on the desk. Hardcovers and paperbacks, new books and old books.
Once you turn against yourself, it’s hard not to believe that everyone else is against you, too.
Adolescence feeds on drama, it is most happy when living in extremis, and Ferguson was no less vulnerable to the lure of high emotion and extravagant unreason than any other boy his age...