After graduating from Columbia University with B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1970, he moved to Paris, France where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, and novels, as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

Auster and his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt (the daughter of professor and scholar Lloyd Hustvedt), were married in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn. Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster.

The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster’s later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between people and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace). Auster’s heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else’s inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. Auster’s more recent works, from Oracle Night (2003) to 4 3 2 1 (2017), have also met with critical acclaim.

“Over the past twenty-five years,” opined Michael Dirda in The New York Review of Books in 2008, “Paul Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.” Dirda also has extolled his loaded virtues in The Washington Post:

In 2012, Auster was quoted as saying in an interview that he would not visit Turkey, in protest of its treatment of journalists. The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan replied: “As if we need you! Who cares if you come or not?” Auster responded: “According to the latest numbers gathered by International PEN, there are nearly one hundred writers imprisoned in Turkey, not to speak of independent publishers such as Ragıp Zarakolu, whose case is being closely watched by PEN Centers around the world”.

Auster’s most recent book, A Life in Words, was published in October 2017 by Seven Stories Press. It brings together three years of conversations with the Danish scholar I.B. Siegumfeldt about each one of his works, both fiction and non-fiction. It is a primary source for understanding Auster’s approach to his work.