The novelist Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey (1947). Growing up, he didn't get along with his father, who was an extremely distant, solitary man. Auster wrote, "Devoid of passion, either for a thing, a person, or an idea, incapable or unwilling to reveal himself under any circumstances, [my father] had managed to keep himself at a distance from life... In the deepest, most unalterable sense, he was an invisible man."
Auster's parents divorced when he was 15, and around the same time he decided to become a writer. He went to Columbia University in 1965, where he spent almost all of his time reading.
He dropped out of graduate school to take a job mopping floors on an oil tanker, and then spent several years living in poverty in Paris. When he returned to the United States, he tried to make a living as a poet and translator, but he could barely pay the bills.
Auster was struggling with writer's block and depression, his marriage was breaking up, and then one morning he learned that his father, the man he'd never gotten along with, had died and left him enough money to support him as a writer. The first book he wrote with that support was a memoir about his father called The Invention of Solitude (1982).
Paul Auster has gone on to write many more novels, including Book of Illusions (2002) and Oracle Night (2003).
He said, "It still seems like a strange way to make a living, sitting alone in a room for long periods of every day... I never go out looking for stories to tell; they grow inside me and become a weird compulsion. So, even though the story might change day to day, I know the characters really well, because I've carried them inside my head for years."
Auster's parents divorced when he was 15, and around the same time he decided to become a writer. He went to Columbia University in 1965, where he spent almost all of his time reading.
He dropped out of graduate school to take a job mopping floors on an oil tanker, and then spent several years living in poverty in Paris. When he returned to the United States, he tried to make a living as a poet and translator, but he could barely pay the bills.
Auster was struggling with writer's block and depression, his marriage was breaking up, and then one morning he learned that his father, the man he'd never gotten along with, had died and left him enough money to support him as a writer. The first book he wrote with that support was a memoir about his father called The Invention of Solitude (1982).
Paul Auster has gone on to write many more novels, including Book of Illusions (2002) and Oracle Night (2003).
He said, "It still seems like a strange way to make a living, sitting alone in a room for long periods of every day... I never go out looking for stories to tell; they grow inside me and become a weird compulsion. So, even though the story might change day to day, I know the characters really well, because I've carried them inside my head for years."
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