Acclaimed Jewish-American novelist Paul Auster dies at 77

Jewish American author Paul Auster has died aged 77 of lung cancer, news agencies reported on Wednesday.

The New York-based novelist, who had a large following in Europe, gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with New York Trilogy, an existentialist, noirish mystery. He also authored the acclaimed film Smoke, about lonely souls at a Brooklyn tobacco shop.

According to AFP, Auster’s work straddles the divide between the middlebrow and the highbrow, and his more than 30 books are as likely to be found in airports as on university reading lists.

“I think he was a really exciting and compelling voice of his generation,” Alys Moody, an American professor who teaches postwar American literature, told NPR.

Auster grew up in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Jewish Polish immigrants. He moved to New York to attend Columbia University and after graduating spent four years in France, where he lived from translations while honing his craft as a writer.

Auster's works

Struggling to write, Auster was inspired following the death of his father and emerged with the 1982 breakthrough The Invention of Solitude.

The same year he married Siri Hustvedt, forming one of New York’s starriest intellectual couples.

New York Trilogy, a philosophical twist on the detective genre, made him a literary star.

“Merely a bestselling author in these parts, Auster is a rock star in Paris,” wrote New York magazine in 2007.

Smoke, which he wrote the screenplay for and co-directed with Wayne  Wang, was a critical hit in 1995, with strong performances by William Hurt and Harvey Keitel.

Its follow-up, Blue in the Face, also featured Keitel, with icons like Jim Jarmusch, Michael J. Fox, Madonna, and Lou Reed.

His last significant work was 2017’s 4 3 2 1, an 866-page novel charting American society, which he considered to be his masterwork.

Auster wrote the text to 2023’s Bloodbath Nation — a photo book by his photographer son-in-law Spencer Ostrander about gun violence in America. Guns are “the central metaphor for everything that continues to divide us,” he wrote.

Auster’s life was marred by tragedy. In 2021, his son Daniel was found guilty of negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month-old daughter Ruby from an overdose. The following year, Daniel died of an overdose at the age of 44. Auster never publicly discussed their deaths.

He and Hustvedt also had a daughter, singer Sophie Auster.

Auster was related to Daniel Auster, the first Jewish mayor of Jerusalem and one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel.