Paul Auster
Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American author. He is married to fellow writer Siri Hustvedt.
Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to France. 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.
His 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 been a red thread between all of Auster's later publications.
Published works
Fiction
Poetry
Film
Biography
- The Art of Hunger (1982)
- The Red Notebook
- The Invention of Solitude (1982)
- Hand To Mouth (1997)
