Auster, Paul

Paul Auster is a poet, essayist, filmmaker, and, above all, novelist whose philosophical and frequently metafictional works have won popular and critical acclaim for the restrained beauty of their storytelling. Auster was born February 3, 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, the grandson of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. After graduating from Columbia University, he lived in France for over three years, returning to New York in July 1974. Later that same year, he married Lydia Davis, also a writer, with whom he has a son, Daniel. Accounts of these times, and of the extreme financial difficulties which marked them, are given in autobiographical writings in the collections The Art of Hunger (1997a) and Hand to Mouth (1997b), while autobiographical allusions appear often in Auster's fiction as well.