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Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947, Newark, New Jersey) is a Brooklyn-based author. He is probably most famous for his collection of three tenuously connected novels, The New York Trilogy. He is also a translator, poet, editor, contributor, script writer and more recently film director.
Biography Paul Auster was born to Jewish middle class parents Samuel and Queenie Auster. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to France where he earned a living translating French writers. 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. He married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, in 1981. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. He is the father of Daniel and Sophie. He is also the Vice-President of PEN American Center. Writing Auster's 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 permeated Auster's later publications. Later Auster's 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). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. Not all criticism has been positive. B.R.Myers attacked Auster in "A Reader's Manifesto." In a review in the 11 October 2006 edition of the TLS, Deborah Friedell described Travels in the Scriptorium as "a slim homage to the novels of Paul Auster" *. He was awarded the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, received in previous years by Günter Grass, Arthur Miller and Mario Vargas Llosa. Fiction Poetry Screenplays Essays, memoirs, and autobiographies Edited collections Translations Misc Other media On the album As Smart as We Are by New York band One Ring Zero, Auster wrote the lyrics for the song "Natty Man Blues" based on Cincinnati poet Norman Finkelstein. In 1993, a movie adaptation of The Music of Chance was released. Michael Mantler's album Hide and Seek uses words by Auster from the play of the same name. Paul Auster's voice can be heard on the 2005 album entitled We Must Be Losing It by the Farangs. The two tracks are entitled "Obituary In The Present Tense" and "Between The Lines". In 2006 Paul Auster directed the film The Inner Life of Martin Frost. It was shot in Lisbon in Portugal and starred his daughter Sophie Auster as the character Anna James. | ||||||||
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