Biography of Paul Auster

Smoke on the paper

February 3, 1947 Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, on February 3, 1947. His father, Samuel, owns some buildings and is quite well-off. After a brief period of happy family Idyll mother, thirteen years younger than her husband, understands that marriage is doomed to fail but, being pregnant with Paul, she decides not to break it. Auster grows in the suburbs of Newark; When he was three years old, a little sister who unfortunately later manifested serious psychological problems, to the point that family members will be forced to make her interdict. In 1959 his parents buy a big house, where the young Paul finds several crates of books left by an uncle who was a wanderer who had traveled to Europe; He jumps headlong into that treasure, law enthusiastically around and begins to love the literature: that's the period when he began writing poetry, and she's only 12. His senior year in high school is also one in which the family splits: Paul Auster's parents divorced and his sister go to live with her mother. Does not participate in graduation: "While my classmates were wearing the touch and toga and received their certificates, I was already on the other side of the Atlantic." So for two and a half months living in Paris, in Italy, in Spain and in Ireland, where he goes only for "reasons that involved solely with James Joyce". Back in America in September he attended college at Columbia University. In 1966 began dating the woman he later married, Mrs Lydia Davis. His father, teacher of literature, French writer Auster presents Ponge. In 1967 he joined the Junior Year Abroad Program at Columbia, which provides accommodation for a year abroad during the third year of college; Auster chose Paris as a destination. In 1968 returned to Columbia: writes articles, book reviews, poems often using pseudonyms such as that of Paul Quinn. After graduating in 1970, he left the United States and embarks on an oil tanker, Esso Florence as a sailor. In 1977 he became the father of Daniel and he moved with his family to the country. Unfortunately, the money is scarce, and Paul? which now has little time to write-he worked in various jobs, inventing even a card game called "Action baseball", and presenting it to the toy fair in New York (but getting very little results). In 1978 comes divorce and the death of her father, who will push him to write in 1982 "The Invention of Solitude" four years after 1978 are those decisive: meets the woman of life, Mrs Siri Hustvedt from which he had a daughter, Sophie, and began full-time writing career, managing finally to have "... the chance to do the job to which intimately" has "always felt led". The success came in 1987 with the publication of "The New York Trilogy" and Paul Auster becomes one of the most respected contemporary writers internationally, being able to have a leading role not only within the strictly literary, but also in Hollywood, with the film "The Music of Chance", "Smoke", "Blue in the Face" and "Lulu On The Bridge.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.