AUSTER, PAUL

born Feb. 3, 1947, Newark, N.J., U.S. American novelist, essayist, translator, and poet whose complex mystery novels are often concerned with the search for identity and personal meaning. After graduating from Columbia University (M.A., 1970), Auster moved to France, where he began translating the works of French writers and publishing his own work in American journals. He gained renown for a series of experimental detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy (1987). It comprises City of Glass (1985), about a crime novelist who becomes entangled in a mystery that causes him to assume various identities; Ghosts (1986), about a private eye known as Blue who is investigating a man named Black for a client named White; and The Locked Room (1986), the story of an author who, while researching the life of a missing writer for a biography, gradually assumes the identity of that writer. Other books that feature protagonists who are obsessed with chronicling someone else's life are the novels Moon Palace (1989) and Leviathan (1992). The Invention of Solitude (1982) is both a memoir about the death of his father and a meditation on the act of writing. Auster's other writings include the verse volumes Unearth (1974) and Wall Writing (1976), the essay collections White Spaces (1980) and The Art of Hunger (1982), and the novels The Music of Chance (1990) and Mr. Vertigo (1994). He also wrote the screenplay for the critically acclaimed film Smoke (1995).