AUSTER, PAUL

AUSTER, PAUL (1947– ), U.S. writer. Born in New Jersey, Auster studied at Columbia University, and after receiving his M.A. became a merchant seaman, spending the years from 1971 to 1974 in France. His early notable work encompasses translations and poetry, for example, A Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems (1972) and Unearth: Poems, 1970–1972 (1974). Auster – as well as critics – has pointed out his multiple literary heritages: Jabes, Kafka, Blanchot (whom Auster translated), Hawthorne, and Hamsun, to name but a few. Running throughout most of his works is a quest for certainty, and if not that, at least the demarcation of a figure or event bestowing a putative coherence upon history and memory. He recounted to Adam Begley, in the latter's "Case of the Brooklyn Symbolist" (New York Times, August 30, 1992), that 1979 was a shattering year: "I had run into a wall with my work. I was blocked and miserable, my marriage was falling apart, I had no money, I was finished." The death of Auster's father opened up, for the "blocked" author, both the possibilities of writing a memoir as well as questions about fiction's capacity to recount the world by accounting for itself. His search for his father's self, and the recovery of the past, is found in The Invention of Solitude (1982), which suggest the roles that chance, the violation of expectation, and the power of memory play in literature's creation of order which is, nonetheless, paradoxical. Heraclitus provided Auster's epigraph as well as a clue to much of his later writing: "In searching out the truth be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it." Auster's novels, making much of the self in its relation to others, as well as to its own nature, offer dazzling inventiveness, a taste for a metaphysical playfulness, and often despair regarding the limits of writing and cognition. His major works are "The New York Trilogy" consisting of City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986); The Music of Chance (1990); Leviathan (1992); and Mr. Vertigo (1994). His screenplays can be found in Three Films: Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge (2003). His Collected Prose appeared in 2003; his Collected Poems in 2004. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: C. Springer, A Paul Auster Sourcebook (2001); I. Shiloh, Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest (2002); J. Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions (2002); H. Bloom (ed.), Paul Auster (2004). (Lewis Fried (2nd ed.)