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By Alex Williams
Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern revival of crime fiction and who became one of the iconic New York writers of his generation, died Tuesday night at his home in Brooklyn. He was 77.
His death, after headaches caused by lung cancer, was revealed through his wife, Siri Hustvedt.
With his narrowed eyes, poignant air, and leader-like looks, Mr. Auster was described as a “literary superstar” in the media. The British literary supplement Times once called him “one of America’s most spectacularly creative writers. “
Although he is originally from New Jersey, he has become indelibly tied to the rhythms of the city he follows, which is a character in many of his paintings, especially Brooklyn, where he settled in 1980 amid the oak-lined brown sandstone streets of Park Slope. room.
As his reputation grew, Auster became known as a guardian of Brooklyn’s literary past, as well as an inspiration to a new generation of novelists who flocked to the borough in the 1990s and beyond.
“Paul Auster was the novelist of Brooklyn in the ’80s and ’90s, when I grew up there, at a time when very few prominent writers lived in the neighborhood,” said poet Meghan O’Rourke, who grew up in Brooklyn. near Prospect Heights, he wrote in an email. His books were on the shelves of all my parents’ friends. When we were teenagers, my friends and I avidly read Auster’s paintings, either because of their strangeness (that touch of European surrealism) or because of their proximity.
“Long before Brooklyn became a position that every single novelist seemed to live in, from Colson Whitehead to Jhumpa Lahiri,” he added, “Auster made it feel like being an editor was a real thing, anything a user did. “
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