Novelist Paul Auster has died aged 77 following a lengthy battle with lung cancer, just two years after the deaths of his son and granddaughter who had died from overdoses.
The iconic writer, and author behind the award-winning novels The New York Trilogy, passed away on Tuesday with his death confirmed by his friend and fellow novelist Jacki Lyden.
Auster had penned an impressive 34 books during the span of his career, with his last – Baumgartner – being released this year.
The American author became widely-recognised for his ‘highly stylised, quirkily riddlesome postmodernist fiction in which narrators are rarely other than unreliable and the bedrock of plot is continually shifting,’ the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote on 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 his 10-month-old granddaughter Ruby died of drug overdoses.
Paul Auster died aged 77 on Tuesday following a battle with lung cancer
Auster was the author behind the award-winning novels The New York Trilogy
Daniel was found dead, surrounded by drug paraphernalia, just nine days after his arrest for the manslaughter of his daughter.
He had been arrested on Easter Sunday in April 2022, following the November 1, 2021, death of Ruby who had died of a fentanyl overdose after Daniel had taken heroin and then taken a nap with the child by his side.
The vivid account allegedly given to the NYPD by Daniel was shared by Assistant District Attorney Tien Tran, said at his arraignment hearing on manslaughter charges.
The infant’s mother, Zuzan Smith, told police that their daughter, Ruby, was awake and alert when she left her in Daniel’s care and went to work.
A criminal complaint obtained by DailyMail.com at the time stated that Daniel told police that shortly after Smith left their home, he injected heroin and then got into bed for a nap with the child by his side.
When he woke up from his nap, she was ‘blue, lifeless and unresponsive’, the complaint stated.
It was unclear how the girl ingested the drugs, but Auster confessed that he kept heroin in his bathroom.
The prosecutor said that the girl had enough drugs in her system to ‘render an adult unconscious.’
An autopsy conducted by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner a few days after the death found Ruby has 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 – which starred Harvey Keitel and William Hurt – Daniel played the role of a book thief.
Daniel and his father appeared to be estranged, but Auster wrote Daniel into his work.
The tragic news of Auster’s death comes just two years after tragedy struck his family after his son Daniel Auster, 44, and his 10-month-old granddaughter Ruby died of drug overdoses
Daniel had been arrested on Easter Sunday in April 2022, following the November 1, 2021, death of Ruby who had died of a fentanyl overdose after Daniel had taken heroin and then taken a nap with the child by his side
Daniel Auster is pictured in a photo with his father Paul, in a shot from his teenage years
In his 2004 novel, Oracle Night, the book is narrated by a writer called Trause whose son is a drug addict who terrorizes his stepmother.
During a 2006 Guardian interview, Paul Auster’s second wife Siri Hustvedt who is also a writer, declined to speak about her stepson.
‘Yes. You know, I’m not going to talk about any of that, no. No,’ she said, her eyes reportedly beginning to water.
‘You know, I am married to a writer, and this – writing – is an odd enterprise.
‘It’s something we both support very strongly.
‘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 Jewish Polish immigrants.
He moved to New York to attend Columbia University and after graduating spent four years in France, where he lived from translations while honing his craft as a writer.
Auster was known for writing his son into his works. In his 2004 novel, Oracle Night, the book is narrated by a writer called Trause whose son is a drug addict who terrorizes his stepmother
He went through particularly dark times in the 1970s when he married, then four years later divorced, US short story writer Lydia Davis, with whom he had Daniel.
‘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,’ he told The New York Times in 1992.
The turning point came with the sudden death of his father, which spurred Auster to write ‘The Invention of Solitude’, a haunting reflection on father-son relationships, a recurring theme in Auster’s work.
Published in 1982 it was a critical success and set Auster free with his writing.
The same year he married Hustvedt, forming one of New York’s starriest intellectual couples.
Following the news of Auster’s death, fans took to Twitter/X to pay tribute to the late author.
One user wrote: ‘Oh man, so sad to hear about Paul Auster passing. Timbuktu is the greatest dog book ever, and I loved the Book Of Illusions with all my heart. Full of gratitude for his contributions, fly on Paul Auster.’
Another added: ‘Devastated to hear Paul Auster passed, one of my favorite contemporary authors, whose prose was matched only by his four-dimensional imagination. He’ll be missed dearly. May he rest in peace.’