Paul Auster has died at the age of 77. The American novelist had been fighting cancer for a long time. “If you have a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll be tempted to start using it”

Paul Auster, the author of 34 books, including the acclaimed New York trilogy, has died at the age of 77, reports the New York Times and The Guardian.

American novelist Paul Auster died on Tuesday of complications from lung cancer, his friend and fellow writer Jacki Lyden confirmed to The Guardian.

Auster became known for his “highly stylized and strangely enigmatic postmodernist fiction, in which the narrators are rarely anything but uncertain and the foundation of the plot is constantly shifting,” novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote in 2010.

His stories often play with themes of coincidence, chance and destiny. Many of his protagonists are writers themselves, and the body of his work is self-referential, with characters from early novels reappearing in later novels.

His life as a writer began at the age of 8

The author was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. According to Auster, his writing life began at the age of eight, when he missed an opportunity to get an autograph from his baseball hero, Willie Mays, because neither neither he nor his parents had a pencil to match. From that moment on, he took a pencil everywhere. “If you have a pencil in your pocket, chances are good that one day you’ll be tempted to start using it,” he wrote in a 1995 essay, reports The Guardian.

While hiking during a summer camp at the age of 14, Auster witnessed the moment when a boy within inches of him was struck by lightning and died instantly – an event that, according to him , “absolutely changed” his life and which he thought about “every day”.

Auster studied at Columbia University before moving to Paris in the early 1970s, where he held various jobs, including as a translator, and lived with his girlfriend, the writer Lydia Davis, whom he had met in college. In 1974, they returned to the US and married. In 1977, the couple had a son, Daniel, but the couple separated soon after.

Auster published regularly in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, writing over several novels, including Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002) and Oracle Night (2003) . He also dabbled in filmmaking, writing the screenplay for Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang, for which he won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay in 1995.

In 1981, Auster met writer Siri Hustvedt and they married the following year. In 1987 they had a daughter, Sophie, who became a singer and actress. Auster’s 1992 novel Leviathan, about a man who accidentally blows himself up, features a character named Iris Vegan, who is the heroine of Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold.

Auster was better known in Europe than in his native United States.

In April 2022, Auster and Davis’ son Daniel died of a drug overdose. In March 2023, Auster’s wife, Siri Hustvedt, revealed that the novelist was being treated for cancer, having been diagnosed the previous December. His latest novel, Baumgartner, about a widowed septuagenarian writer, was published in October.

Translated into Romanian

Some of Paul Auster’s books were also translated into Romanian. Among them: The New York Trilogy, The Shining Boy, Timbuktu, The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace, Night of the Oracle, 4321,