• US novelist and screenwriter Paul Auster died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn. He was 77.

• The writer was known for a string of acclaimed works including ‘The New York Trilogy’ and ‘The Book of Illusions’.

• Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1947, Paul Benjamin Auster grew up in a middle class Jewish home.

• 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.

• Starting in the 1970s, Auster completed more than 30 books, translated into dozens of languages. 

• A longtime fixture in the Brooklyn literary scene, he never achieved major commercial success in the US, but he was widely admired overseas for his cosmopolitan worldview and erudite and introspective style and was named a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1991.

• He was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

• Auster blended history, politics, genre experiments, existential quests and self-conscious references to writers and writing. 

• ‘The New York Trilogy’, which included ‘City of Glass’, ‘Ghosts’ and ‘The Locked Room’, was a postmodern detective saga in which names and identities blur and one protagonist is a private eye named Paul Auster. 

• The author’s longest and most ambitious work of fiction was ‘4 3 2 1’, published in 2017 and a Booker finalist. The 800-plus page novel is a tale of quadraphonic realism in the post World War II era, the parallel journeys of Archibald Isaac Ferguson from summer camp and high school baseball to student life in New York and Paris during the mass protests of the late 1960s.

His film career

• In the mid-1990s, Auster collaborated with director Wayne Wang on the acclaimed art-house film ‘Smoke’, an adaptation of Auster’s story about a Brooklyn cigar shop and a certain customer named Paul. The film starred Harvey Keitel, Stockard Channing and William Hurt among others and brought Auster an Independent Spirit Award for best first screenplay. 

• Wang and Auster quickly followed ‘Smoke’ with ‘Blue in the Face’, an improvised tale which returned to the Brooklyn cigar store and again starred Keitel.

• Auster eventually made the movies himself. Keitel was featured in ‘Lulu on the Bridge’, a love story released in 1998 that Auster directed and co-wrote with Vanessa Redgrave.

• Nine years later, Auster wrote and directed the drama ‘The Inner Life of Martin Frost’, starring David Thewlis as a novelist.

Manorama Yearbook app is now available on Google Play Store and iOS App Store