Novelist Paul Auster died at age 77 after a long battle with lung cancer, just two years after the deaths of his son and granddaughter from overdoses.
The iconic writer and author of the award-winning novels The New York Trilogy passed away on Tuesday and his death was confirmed by his friend and fellow novelist Jacki Lyden.
Auster had written an impressive 34 books over the course of his career, with his latest, Baumgartner, being published this year.
The American author became widely recognized for his “highly stylized and peculiarly enigmatic postmodernist fiction in which the narrators are rarely more than unreliable and the basis of the plot continually changes,” novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote about the late writer in 2010.
But the tragic news of his death comes just two years after tragedy struck his family after his son Daniel Auster, 44, and granddaughter Ruby, 10 months, died of drug overdoses.
Paul Auster died Tuesday at age 77 after a battle with lung cancer.
Auster was the author of the award-winning novels The New York Trilogy.
Auster and his son Daniel, photographed as children in a photo posted on his Instagram before he died, titled ‘Me and my dad’.
Daniel was found dead in a subway station, surrounded by drug paraphernalia, just four days after his arrest on April 16, 2022 for the involuntary manslaughter of his daughter.
He had been arrested following the Nov. 1, 2021, death of his daughter Ruby, who had died of a fentanyl overdose after Daniel used heroin and then took a nap with the girl by his side.
He was released on bail on April 17 by Brooklyn Judge John Hecht, who required $100,000 cash bail or $250,000 bail. It is unclear who met those bail requirements.
On April 20, he overdosed on the subway platform of the northbound G train at the Washington Avenue/Clinton Street stop in New York City.
The vivid account of Ruby’s death that Daniel allegedly gave to the NYPD a few days earlier was shared by Deputy District Attorney Tien Tran, he said at his involuntary manslaughter arraignment hearing.
The baby’s mother, Zuzan Smith, told police that her daughter, Ruby, was awake and alert when she left her in Daniel’s care and went to work.
The tragic news of Auster’s death comes just two years after tragedy struck his family after his son Daniel Auster, 44, and granddaughter Ruby, 10 months, died of drug overdoses.
Daniel had been arrested on Easter Sunday in April 2022, following the death of Ruby on November 1, 2021, who had died of a fentanyl overdose after Daniel used heroin and then took a nap with the child at his side. side.
Daniel’s wife, Zuzan, told police that Ruby was awake and alert when she left her in Daniel’s care and went to work in November 2021.
A criminal complaint obtained by DailyMail.com at the time claimed that Daniel told police that shortly after Smith left his home, he shot up heroin and then climbed into bed to take a nap with the boy by his side. .
When she woke up from her nap, she was “blue, lifeless and unresponsive,” according to the complaint.
It was unclear how the girl ingested the drugs, but Auster confessed that she kept heroin in her bathroom.
The prosecutor said the girl had enough drugs in her system to “knock an adult unconscious.”
An autopsy performed by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner a few days after the death found that Ruby died of acute intoxication caused by the combined effects of fentanyl and heroin.
In Auster’s 1995 film about the lives of people who frequented a Brooklyn tobacco shop, Smoke, starring Harvey Keitel and William Hurt, Daniel played the role of a book thief.
Daniel and his father seemed to be estranged, but Auster included Daniel in his work.
Daniel Auster appears in a photo with his father Paul, in a shot from his adolescence.
Auster was known for including his son in his works. In his 2004 novel, Oracle Night, the book is narrated by a writer named Trause whose son is a drug addict who terrorizes his stepmother.
In his 2004 novel, Oracle Night, the book is narrated by a writer named Trause whose son is a drug addict who terrorizes his stepmother.
During an interview with The Guardian in 2006, Paul Auster’s second wife, Siri Hustvedt, who is also a writer, refused to talk about her stepson.
‘Yeah. You know, I’m not going to talk about any of that, no. ‘No,’ she said, and his eyes reportedly began to tear up.
You know, I’m married to a writer and this, writing, is a strange undertaking.
‘It’s something we both strongly support.
“I’ve always been behind Paul and he’s always been behind me.
“I have a very strong family.”
Auster grew up in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants.
He moved to New York to attend Columbia University and after graduating spent four years in France, where he made a living from translations while honing his craft as a writer.
Auster (pictured center) with his second wife, Siri Hustvedt (left) and daughter Sophie (right).
Hustvedt (left), who is also a writer, never spoke about her stepson, Daniel. She is photographed with her husband Auster in 2016.
He went through particularly dark times in the 1970s when he married and four years later divorced the American short story writer Lydia Davis, with whom he had Daniel.
‘I had hit a wall with my work. I was stuck and miserable, my marriage was falling apart, I had no money. “I was finished,” he told The New York Times in 1992.
The turning point came with the sudden death of his father, which prompted Auster to write ‘The Invention of Solitude’, a disturbing reflection on father-son relationships, a recurring theme in Auster’s work.
Published in 1982, it was a critical success and freed Auster with his writing.
The same year she married Hustvedt, forming one of the most famous intellectual couples in New York.
Auster and Hustvedt had a daughter, Sophie, who became a singer and actress.
The author was better known in Europe than in his native United States: “Simply a best-selling author in this area,” read a 2007 New York magazine article.
“Auster is a rock star in Paris.”
In 2006 he received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and in 1993 the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan.
Following the news of Auster’s death, fans took to Twitter/X to pay tribute to the late author.
One user wrote: ‘Oh so sad to hear that Paul Auster passed away. Timbuktu is the best dog book of all time and I loved The Book of Illusions with all my heart. Full of gratitude for his contributions, I flew over to Paul Auster.’
Another added: “Devastated to hear of the death of Paul Auster, one of my favorite contemporary authors, whose prose was matched only by his four-dimensional imagination. We will miss him very much. May he rest in peace.’