Paul Auster, the celebrated author of nearly three-dozen books — including Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions and The New York Trilogy — screenwriter on Wayne Wang’s Smoke and director of Lulu on the Bridge, has died. His friend, Jacki Lyden, confirmed the news to the New York Times. Auster was 77.
Auster’s debut work, a memoir titled The Invention of Solitude, won critical praise.
His stature as one of America’s most prominent authors was cemented with with a series of three loosely connected stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. They are City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986). The books in the Trilogy play on tropes of the detective novel to address existential questions.
Critic Michael Dirda wrote of Auster’s work, “Ever since City of Glass, the first volume of his New York Trilogy, Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination.”
Several of Auster’s 18 novels were made into movies, including The Music of Chance.
He later wrote films himself, beginning with the screenplay for Smoke (1995) starring Harvey Keitel, William Hurt and Giancarlo Esposito. Auster’s work on the film won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay.
His collaboration with Wang continued as the duo co-directed a sequel, Blue in the Face, again starring Keitel and Esposito along with Lou Reed, Mira Sorvino and Madonna. Auster is also credited on the screenplay for Wang’s The Center of the World.
In 1998, Auster wrote and directed Lulu on the Bridge, with Keitel, Sorvino and Richard Edson. He did double duty again on 2007’s The Inner Life of Martin Frost, starring David Thewlis, Iréne Jacob and Michael Imperioli.
Auster’s 2017 novel, 4321 was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
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