Renowned author Paul Auster, who wrote a total of 34 books of which the New York Trilogy stands out, has passed away at the age of 77.
According to his colleague Jackie Linden, Auster died on Tuesday due to complications from the lung cancer he had been suffering from in recent years.
Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1947 and according to him, his writing life began at the age of 8 when he was unable to get an autograph from baseball player Willie Mays because neither he nor his parents had a pencil with them at the game.
From then on, he took a pencil with him everywhere he went. “If there is a pencil in your pocket, there is a good chance that one day you will be tempted to start using it,” he wrote in a 1995 essay.
Another incident that marked his life was the death of a boy who was struck by lightning while inches away from him at a campsite where Auster had been at the age of 14. Fate, “understandably, became a recurring theme in his fiction,” wrote critic Laura Miller in 2017.
A similar incident occurs in Auster’s novel 4 3 2 1, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2017: one of four versions of protagonist Archie Ferguson in the book runs under a tree at a summer camp and is killed by a falling branch when he is struck by lightning.
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Auster studied at Columbia University before moving to Paris in the early 1970s, where he worked at various jobs, including translation, and lived with his partner, the writer Lydia Davis, whom he had met while in college.
In 1974 they returned to the US and married. In 1977, the couple had a son, Daniel, but divorced shortly afterwards.
In April 2022, Auster and Davis’ son Daniel died of a drug overdose. In March 2023, it was announced that the author had begun treatment for cancer, which he had been diagnosed with in December 2022…Auster’s latest novel, Baumgartner, about a widowed 70-year-old writer, was published in October.
