Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey on 3 February 1947. He is a contemporary American novelist of Jewish origin. His father, Samuel Auster, was a landlord, who owned buildings with his brothers in Jersey City. His mother, Queenie Auster, was some 13 years younger than her husband. The family was middle-class, the parents' marriage an unhappy one. Queenie had realized, even before the end of the honeymoon, that the marriage had been a mistake, but her pregnancy made escape impossible.

Auster grew up in the Newark suburbs of South Orange and Maplewood. When he was 3? years old, a younger sister was born. By the time she was five, her psychological instability was becoming apparent, and in later years she would be debilitated by mental breakdowns. Auster, meanwhile, began to feel, as he discloses in his memoir Hand to Mouth, like "an internal émigré, an exile in my own house."

In 1959 his parents bought a large Tudor house in their town's most prestigious neighborhood. It was here that Auster's uncle, the skilled translator Allen Mandelbaum, left several boxes of books in storage while he traveled to Europe. The young Auster read the books enthusiastically, and his developing interest in writing and in literature further accentuated his sense of separation from his parents. Auster further benefited from Mandelbaum's proximity when he began writing poems as a teenager: "He was very hard on me, very strict, very good," Auster recounted in a Publishers Weekly interview.

Auster attended high school in Maplewood, some 20 miles southwest of New York City. Instead of attending his high-school graduation, Auster headed for Europe. He visited Italy, Spain, Paris, and, in homage to James Joyce, Dublin. While he traveled he worked on a novel he had begun in the spring.

He returned to the United States in time to start at Columbia University in the fall.

In 1967 Auster again left the USA to attend Columbia's Junior Year Abroad in Paris. Disillusioned by the program's routine, undemanding academic requirements, Auster quit college and lived until mid-November in a small hotel on the rue Clément. When he returned to New York, a sympathetic dean reinstated him at Columbia.

A high lottery number saved Auster from having to worry about the Vietnam draft, and instead of pursuing a Ph.D. he took a job with the Census Bureau. During this period he also began work on the novels In the Country of Last Things and Moon Palace , which he would not complete until many years later.

On 6 October 1974, Auster married Lydia Davis but this marriage should fail.

Auster and Davis worked on book translations?most of them, with the exception of a Jean-Paul Sartre collection titled Life/Situations, exceedingly pedestrian. Auster worked on two more poetic sequences, Wall Writing and Disappearances, and contributed reviews and essays to the New York Review of Books, Commentary, Harper's, and elsewhere.

On 14 January 1979, the morning after he had completed White Spaces, one of Auster's uncles phoned to say that Auster's father had died during the night. The inheritance that Auster received, though by no means enormous, was instrumental in the continuation of his career. Auster explained to McCaffery and Gregory that "for the first time in my life I had the time to write, to take on long projects without worrying about how I was going to pay the rent."

Auster's final original collection of poetry, Facing the Music, was published in 1980 by Station Hill Press. The same year?as well as the same publisher?saw the publication of Auster's prose work White Spaces. Auster had by now completed Portrait of an Invisible Man?an extended meditation on his father's death that would form the first half of The Invention of Solitude?and during 1980 he would begin work on Invention's second half, The Book of Memory. What Auster would later call the "uni-vocal expression" of his poems was beginning to give way to the self-contradictory expression of prose, and the poet was on the verge of transforming himself into a novelist.

By early 1980 Auster had moved from his dismal lodgings on Varick Street to an apartment in Brooklyn. There he worked on The Book of Memory and on a bilingual anthology titled The Random House Book of Twentieth Century-French Poetry. It was here that a pair of wrong-number phone calls intended for the Pinkerton Agency planted the seed that would become City of Glass.

On 23 February 1981 Auster attended a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y. There he met Siri Hustvedt, a tall woman of Norwegian ancestry, born in Minnesota in 1955. Auster and Hustvedt very quickly fell in love and were married on Bloomsday.

In 1986 Auster had taken on a position as lecturer at Princeton University?a post he would continue to hold until 1990.

Next to the taut structures of his previous novels, Moon Palace, published in 1989, seemed like one of the "large loose baggy monsters" that Henry James referred to in his introduction to The Tragic Muse. Despite its comparative bulk and wandering narrative, Auster's "Bildungsroman" was held together by a complex web of associations linking the personal development of its protagonist, Marco Stanley Fogg, with the movement of American history. When the critical history of Auster's oeuvre has at last been written, it may be Frederick Jackson Turner's famous essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" that provides the best explication of Moon Palace.

By this time, Auster and Hustvedt were living in an apartment in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, and Auster's writing was done in a studio about a block away. The couple now had a daughter, Sophie, and Hustvedt's name was filtering into the periphery of the literary world's vision with published fragments of the novel that would become The Blindfold and her 1987 translation, in collaboration with David McDuff, of Norwegian scholar Geir Kjetsaa's biography of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Auster's 1990 novel, The Music of Chance, developed the basic motif of his failed Laurel and Hardy play. The novel proved an unexpected challenge to write, and underwent major changes while in progress. Auster finished The Music of Chance, his novel about men building a wall, on 9 November 1989?the same day the Berlin Wall fell.

The Music of Chance, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner award the year after its publication, attracted the interest of several people in the movie industry.

Auster's involvement with film, though, had not lessened his commitment to his primary craft. By the time Smoke and Blue in the Face were released (in June and October 1995, respectively), Auster had published two more novels. Leviathan, written just before he started work on the Smoke screenplay, and published in 1992, proved to be a complex, involuted novel of ideas?the most sophisticated fiction Auster had constructed in the expansive mode he had adopted with Moon Palace . Mr. Vertigo, published in 1994, was fatally marred by the constant stream of implausibly cartoonish smart-talk issuing from the mouth of its protagonist, but sporadically, and against all odds, rose to magical heights as it described that same character's experience of levitation.

As Auster became increasingly involved with film, an event that could have sprung from the pages of his fiction resurrected a lost piece of his past. In 1976 Auster had translated a book by the deceased French anthropologist Pierre Clastres. The Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians painted the picture of a small Paraguayan tribe at the edge of extinction. Auster held the book in much higher regard than many of the academic works he and Lydia Davis had translated, and duly submitted the manuscript to its intended publishers. The book was never published, the publishing house folded, and the galleys were thought to be lost forever?and, in those days, Auster was much too poor to have allowed himself the luxury of a photocopy. Twenty years later, in late 1996, a young bibliophile attending an Auster lecture in San Francisco laid a set of bound galleys before the astonished Auster; he had picked up this unique find in a secondhand bookstore for five dollars. The translation was at last published by Zone Books in 1998. 

Credit: englisch.schule.de