American writer and director Paul Auster attends a photocall during the annual Edinburgh International Book Festival. Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images)Paul Auster, a prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77.
His reputation was anything but local, however. He took home several literary prizes in France alone. Like Woody Allen and Mickey Rourke, Auster, who had lived in Paris as a young man, became one of those rare American imports to be embraced by the French as a native son. Most writers are perfectly satisfied with traditional literary models and happy to produce works they feel are beautiful and true and goodThe book became the first instalment in his most celebrated work, The New York Trilogy, three novels later packaged in a single volume. It was listed as one of the 25 most significant New York City novels of the last 100 years in a round-up in T, the style magazine published by The New York Times.
As Auster put it in A Life in Words, “most writers are perfectly satisfied with traditional literary models and happy to produce works they feel are beautiful and true and good”. He would then turn to his vintage Olympia typewriter to type his handwritten manuscripts. He immortalised the trusty machine in his 2002 book The Story of My Typewriter, with illustrations by painter Sam Messer.
The film, heavy with philosophical musings, stars Harvey Keitel as Auggie, the proprietor of a Park Slope tobacco shop that is a locus for a colourful assortment of neighbourhood dreamers and eccentrics. One is Paul Benjamin , a cerebral, cigarette-puffing writer whose life is saved when a young man pulls him from the path of a truck.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature in 1969, followed by a master’s in the same subject, he did a stint working on an oil tanker before moving to Paris. There, he scraped together rent money by translating French literature while starting to publish his own work in literary journals.
There’s a tendency among journalists to regard the work that puts you in the public eye for the first time as your best workPaul Auster remained prolific, publishing several books in recent years, including Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane and Bloodbath Nation , a chilling meditation on American gun violence. His final novel, Baumgartner, came out last year.
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