Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle class parents of Polish descent Samuel and Queenie Auster. He attended school in Maplewood, New Jersey and graduated from Columbia High School. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, France where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, novels of his own as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.
He married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, in 1981. Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. They had one son together, Daniel Auster.
He is also the Vice-President of PEN American Center.
Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely-connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, space, language and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique on postmodernism) form in the process.
The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. Auster's more recent works, Oracle Night (2004), The Brooklyn Follies (2005) and the novella Travels in the Scriptorium have also met critical acclaim.
Two strong elements in Paul Auster's writing are Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis and the American transcendentalism of the early to middle 19th century, namely amongst others Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau.
In short Lacan's theory declares that we enter the world through words. We observe the world through our senses but the world we sense is structured (mediated) in our mind through language. Thus our subconscious is also structured as a language. This leaves us with a sense of anomaly. We can only perceive the world through language, but we have the feeling of a lack. The lack is the sense of a being outside of language. The world can only be constructed through language but it always leaves something uncovered, something that can not be told and be thought of, it can only be sensed. This can be seen as one of the central themes of Paul Auster's writing.
Lacan is considered to be one of the key figures of French poststructuralism. The strong influence of other poststructuralist philosophers can also be found throughout Auster's oeuvre. Mainly Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Michel de Certeau.
The transcendentalists believe in the fact that the symbolic order of civilization separated us from the natural order of the world. By moving into nature - like Thoreau in Walden - it would be possible to return to this natural order.
The common factor of both ideas is the question of the meaning of symbols for human beings. Auster's protagonists are often writers who establish meaning in their lives through writing, and they try to find their place within the natural order to be able to live again in civilization.
Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Herman Melville have also had a strong influence on Auster's writing. Not only do their characters reappear in Austers work (like William Wilson in New York Trilogy or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in The Locked Room). Auster also uses variations on the themes of these writers.
Paul Auster's reappearing subjects are:
* coincidence
* frequent portrayal of an ascetic life
* a sense of imminent disaster
* obsessive writer as central character/narrator
* loss of the ability to understand
* loss of language
* depiction of daily and ordinary life
* failure
* absence of a father
* writing/story telling, metafiction
* intertextuality
* American History
* American Space
Instances of coincidence can be found all over Auster's work. Auster himself claims that people are so influenced by all the consistent stories that surround them, that they do not see the elements of coincidence, inconsistency and contradiction in their own lives:
“ This idea of contrasts, contradictions, paradox, I think, gets very much to the heart of what novel writing is for me. It's a way for me to express my own contradictions.”
Failure in Paul Auster's works is not just the opposite of the happy ending. In Moon Palace or The Book of Illusions it results from the individual's uncertainty about the status of his own identity. The protagonists start a search for their own identity and reduce their life to the absolute minimum. From this zero point they gain new strength and start their new life and they are also able to get into contact with their environment again. A similar development can also be seen in City of Glass or The Music of Chance.
Failure in this context is not the "nothing" - it is the beginning of something all new.
Auster's protagonists often have to go through a development that reduces their existence to the absolute necessary: They cut off contact to their family and friends, hunger and lose or give away all their belongings. Out of this approximation of their nil they either gain new strength to connect to the world again or they fail and finally disappear.
“ But in the end, he manages to resolve the question for himself - more or less. He finally comes to accept his own life, to understand that no matter how bewitched and haunted he is, he has to accept reality as it is, to tolerate the presence of ambiguity within himself. ”
