Like Saul Bellow’s Chicago or Philip Roth’s New Jersey, the American writer Paul Auster will always be synonymous with Brooklyn. He was “the patron saint of literary Brooklyn” according to the headline in the New York Times tribute after his death this week. Long before Brooklyn became a byword for aspiring young novelists, Auster made the borough his own with his breakout collection The New York Trilogy, first published in 1987. While Auster may have chafed against its enduring success, the trilogy is the work for which he will be most remembered. Anyone with bookish pretensions who came of age in the 1980s will have a battered copy somewhere on their shelves. City of Glass, the lead story, was rejected 17 times before it was published as a freestanding novel in 1985.
Famously prolific, Auster averaged a book annually until his final novel Baumgartner, about an octogenarian author, was published at the end of last year (he also wrote the text for a book of photographs, Bloodbath Nation, about mass shootings in the US, published at the beginning of last year). He was as versatile as he was prodigious – able to turn his hand as elegantly to non-fiction, translation, poetry and screenplays. As the American writer Rachel Kushner says, “from translating Maurice Blanchot early in his career, to shaping what fiction could be, in the New York Trilogy, which every writer of my generation read, absorbed, and in some sense, responded to, to writing, suddenly, and late in life, an 800-page biography of Stephen Crane, Auster shows us what it means to be endlessly curious, ambitious, and above all, literary.”
