Paul Auster
| Paul Auster | |
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Auster at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival
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| Born | Paul Benjamin Auster February 3, 1947 Newark, New Jersey, United States |
| Pen name |
Paul Queen Paul Benjamin |
| Occupation | Novelist and poet |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1974–present |
| Genre | Absurdist fiction, crime fiction, mystery fiction |
| Literary movement | Postmodernism |
| Spouse |
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| Website | |
| paul-auster |
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Paul Queen
Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American writer and director whose writing blends absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), and The Brooklyn Follies (2005). His books have been translated into more than forty languages.
Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle-class parents of Polish descent, Queenie (née Bogat) and Samuel Auster. He is the older cousin of conservative columnist Lawrence Auster. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey and Newark and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood.
After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, France where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, and novels of his own, as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.
Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. 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, space, language, and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process. Comparing the two works, Auster said, "I believe the world is filled with strange events. Reality is a great deal more mysterious than we ever give it credit for. In that sense, the Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude."
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