Beloved author Paul Auster dies with cancer aged 77 two years after tragic deaths of son and baby granddaughter | 959713O | 2024-05-01 19:08:01
BELOVED author Paul Auster, who penned the acclaimed New York Trilogy, has died at the age of 77.
Auster died on Tuesday from complications due to lung cancer, according to his friend and fellow author Jacki Lyden.
His death comes two years after his son, Daniel, died from a drug overdose in April 2022.
Daniel Auster, 44, died just days after being charged in the death of his 10-month-old daughter, Ruby.
In a deposition, Daniel said he used heroin before taking a nap with his daughter and woke up to her dead body.
His wife, Zuzan Smith, was at work at the time but said her daughter was alert and awake before she left their home.
Investigators say the infant died from acute intoxication of heroin and fentanyl.
Auster and his son were estranged around the time of his death, however, he had a history of writing his son into his work.
He authored 34 books with his last novel, Baumgartner, coming out last year.
His other recent works include Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane in 2021 and Bloodbath Nation in 2023.
Auster was known for writing about writers, often having a meta-styled narrative.
He also created his own universe as characters from his early works would appear in later ones.
"Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature," wrote critic Michael Dirda in 2008.
"His narrative voice is as hypnotic as that of the Ancient Mariner. Start one of his books and by page two you cannot choose but hear."
Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1947 and he began writing around eight years old after missing out on an autograph from his favorite baseball player, Willie Mays.
Neither he nor his parents had a pencil with them at the game and from that day forward, Auster carried a pencil everywhere he went.
"If there's a pencil in your pocket, there's a good chance that one day you'll feel tempted to start using it," he wrote in 1995.
His life changed during a hiking trip when he was 14 and saw a boy just a few inches away getting struck by lightning and dying instantly.
After that incident, Auster began writing about chance and fate, which became recurring themes in his writing.
He studied at Columbia University before moving to Paris in the early 1970s, where he lived with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Lydia Davis, whom he met in college.
The two returned to the US in 1974 and got married before having their son, Daniel in 1977.
However, the couple later separated.
His father, Samuel, died in January 1979, inspiring Auster to write his first memoir, The Invention of Solitude in 1982.
Through his writing, Auster revealed that his paternal grandfather was shot and killed by his grandmother, who was later acquitted on grounds of insanity.
"A boy cannot live through this kind of thing without being affected by it as a man," Auster wrote, referring to his father, with whom he had an "un-movable relationship, cut off from each other on opposite sides of a wall."
In 1981, Auster met Siri Hustvedt and they married a year later.
They share a daughter, Sophie, who became a singer and actor.
In March 2023, it was revealed that Auster was receiving treatment for lung cancer after being diagnosed in December of the year before.
He is survived by Hustvedt, their daughter, a grandson, and his sister, Janet Auster.
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