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Iconic novelist, Paul Auster leaves behind an immense literary heritage. His life is also marked by a terrible tragedy: the death of his granddaughter.
The writer Paul Auster succumbed to illness: a life marked by the terrible tragedy of his son, charged for the death of his baby
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Icon of New York literature and considered the most French of American writers, Paul Auster died at the age of 77, succumbing to complications from lung cancer. He died in the neighborhood he loved so much, Brooklyn, New York. Family friend, Jacki Lyden announced the sad news to the international press. “Paul died this evening, at his home, surrounded by his loved ones“, she wrote on Tuesday April 30, 2024.
His wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, announced in 2023 that he was suffering from cancer. At the end of August, in a long, poignant post on Instagram, accompanied by photos of the young couple, she indicated that Paul Auster was not out of the woods. Comparing her husband’s fate to that of “sick children”, she estimated that “Paul (had) many years behind him, his childhood, his youth, his adulthood” and that'”he (was) now old.“
This descendant of Ashkenazi Jews studied French, Italian and British literature at Columbia University in New York. After his studies, he lived in Paris from 1971 to 1975 and translated French poets, but he had to take on more jobs before he could make a living from his books. The inheritance from his father, who died in 1979, allowed him to devote himself to writing. He became known in 1982 with The invention of solitude, an autobiographical novel where he tries to understand his father’s personality. The novelist broke through on the international scene in 1987, particularly in Europe, with his “New York Trilogy”, a noir novel inspired by the detective genre.
Paul Auster’s granddaughter found dead after her father’s criminal negligence
A life in the service of literature but also marked by tragedy. In April 2022, he lost his son Daniel Auster, 44, whom he had with the writer Lydia Davis, his first wife. The latter died of an “accidental overdose” in New York after being charged with involuntary manslaughter for the death at the end of 2021, also by overdose, of his daughter Ruby, aged only ten months.
Daniel Auster was found unconscious on a subway platform in Brooklyn on the morning of April 20 and taken to hospital where he died six days later, a New York police spokesperson said.
According to police sources cited by the tabloid New York Post, Daniel Auster died of an “accidental overdose”. The forty-year-old was arrested, charged and released on bail around ten days ago for involuntary manslaughter and criminal negligence against his daughter Ruby. While in his care on November 1 at his home in Brooklyn, the baby was found unconscious. Hospitalized, Daniel Auster’s daughter died of “acute poisoning due to the combined effects of fentanyl and heroin“, according to the police.
Also a screenwriter, Paul Auster contributed to the film “Smoke”, which portrays lost souls revolving around a Brooklyn tobacco shop, and its sequel “Brooklyn Boogie”, two films he directed with Wayne Wang. His other successful works include “Moon Palace”, “The Book of Illusions” and “Brooklyn Follies”. A revered writer in France, which he considers his “second country”, he received the Foreign Medici Prize for “Leviathan” in 1993. An avowed democrat, he denounced the Bush years in one of his books.
Despite being diagnosed with cancer the same year, he completed a final book with a nostalgic tone, “Baumgartner”, a “tender and miraculous little book”, in the words of his wife Siri Hustvedt.