Paul Auster, the novelist and filmmaker whose 1980s reinvention of noir helped define a generation of New York writers, died on April 30, 2024. At the time of his passing he was 77 and had a reported net worth of $25 million; he died of complications from lung cancer at 77.
On March 11, 2023, Auster’s wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt, disclosed his diagnosis on Instagram: “My husband was diagnosed with cancer in December after having been ill for several months before that. He is now being treated at Sloan Kettering in New York, and I have been living in a place I have come to call Cancerland.” She added, “Some people survive it, and others die. This everyone knows, and yet living close to that truth changes everyday reality.”
Auster’s death was confirmed by his friend and fellow author, Jacki Lyden.
Tributes poured in from readers and fellow writers. In an email, author and poet Meghan O’Rourke remembered him this way: “Paul Auster was the Brooklyn novelist back in the ’80s and ’90s, when I was growing up there, at a time when very few famous writers lived in the borough. His books were on all my parents’ friends’ shelves. As teenagers, my friends and I read Auster’s work avidly for both its strangeness — that touch of European surrealism — and its closeness.”
Born in Newark, N.J., in 1937 to Jewish, middle-class parents of Austrian descent, Auster earned both undergraduate and Master’s degrees from Columbia University. He spent time living in Paris where he translated French literature before returning to the United States in 1974.
Auster published essays, poems and translations in his twenties, but his breakthrough as a novelist came with City of Glass in 1985, the opening book of the New York Trilogy. The novel, which had been turned down by 17 publishers, launched his wider recognition.
Among his other notable books are Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990) and The Book of Illusions (2002).
His Longtime Park Slope Home
Since the 1980s, Auster made his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He and his wife, Siri Hustvedt, lived together in that refined residence, where the rooms were furnished with a restrained, tasteful touch.
Speaking with The New York Times, Mr. Auster said, “This house is a reflection of Siri and her Scandinavian craving for order. I, unfortunately for my sins, am impervious to my physical surroundings. Not that I don’t enjoy it, but I’d be incapable of creating such a place.”
The house functioned primarily as a family refuge rather than his creative base. Each day he walked to a separate studio, a workspace that contrasted with the orderly home. Of that room he admitted, “In my studio, it is unkempt and unattractive. Once I’m in my work, I don’t notice where I am.”
