Paul Auster

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. 2Early life 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. 2Career 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 proces