Novelist Paul Auster has died at the age of 77 due to complications from lung cancer, his friend and fellow author Jacki Lyden confirmed.
A New Jersey native who ultimately made Brooklyn his home, Auster wrote 34 books throughout his career, including the New York Trilogy, which began with City of Glass, the 1985 novel that wound up being Auster’s breakthrough (after it was first rejected by 17 publishers, according to The New York Times).
Highly regarded as a leading figure in literary postmodernism, Auster was influenced by Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and like Beckett, he lived for a time in Paris, where he translated French literature.
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His work was often marked by random coincidences and existential questions, a trait that he said had likely carried over from his own life.
“When I was about 13 or 14 years old and, I was off at a summer camp, and we got caught in a storm. And a boy standing next to me was killed by a bolt of lightning. Dropped dead. Struck down by the sky. I think maybe that informs my work more than any book I have ever read,” Auster once said of what he described as “the most important day” of his life.
He suffered his own share of tragedy in his personal life as well, having lost his son, Daniel Auster, to a drug overdose in 2022 after the 44-year-old was charged with criminally negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month-old daughter Ruby.
While Auster is most often associated with his New York Trilogy, he was a prolific writer until he died, publishing Bloodbath Nation, about gun violence in America, in 2023, along with his last novel, Baumgartner.
