Celebrated novelist Paul Auster dies aged 77 after lung cancer battle two years after overdose deaths of his son, 44, and baby granddaughter

Novelist Paul Auster has died aged 77 after a lengthy battle with lung cancer, just two years after the deaths of his son and granddaughter from an overdose.

The iconic writer and author behind the award-winning novels The New York Trilogy passed away on Tuesday. His death was confirmed by his friend and fellow novelist Jacki Lyden.

Auster had written no fewer than 34 books over the course of his career, with his latest, Baumgartner, published this year.

The American author was widely recognized for his “highly stylized, idiosyncratically enigmatic postmodernist fiction in which narrators are rarely anything but unreliable and the basis of the plot is constantly changing,” novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote of the late writer in 2010.

But the tragic news of his death comes just two years after tragedy struck his family after his son Daniel Auster, 44, and his ten-month-old granddaughter Ruby died of a drug overdose.

Daniel was found dead in a subway station, surrounded by drug paraphernalia, just four days after his arrest on April 16, 2022 for the manslaughter of his daughter.

He had been arrested following the November 1, 2021, death of his infant daughter Ruby, who had died of a fentanyl overdose after Daniel ingested heroin and then took a nap with the child by his side.

He was released on bail on April 17 by Brooklyn Judge John Hecht, who required a $100,000 bond or a $250,000 bond. It is unclear who met those bond requirements.

On April 20, he overdosed on the northbound G train subway platform at the Washington Avenue/Clinton Street stop in New York City.

The vivid account of Ruby’s death that Daniel allegedly gave to the NYPD just days earlier was shared by Assistant District Attorney Tien Tran, he said during his arraignment hearing on manslaughter charges.

The child’s mother, Zuzan Smith, told police that their daughter, Ruby, was awake and alert when she left her in Daniel’s care and went to work.

A criminal complaint obtained by DailyMail.com at the time stated that Daniel told police that shortly after Smith left their home, he injected heroin and then got into bed to take a nap with the child at his side. silk.

When he woke up from his nap, she was “blue, lifeless and unresponsive,” according to the complaint.

It is unclear how the girl took the drugs, but Auster admitted to having heroin in his bathroom.

The prosecutor said the girl had enough drugs in her system to “knock an adult unconscious.”

An autopsy conducted by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner a few days after the death revealed that Ruby died of acute intoxication caused by the combined effects of fentanyl and heroin.

In Auster’s 1995 film about the lives of people who frequented a Brooklyn tobacconist, Smoke – starring Harvey Keitel and William Hurt – Daniel played the role of a book thief.

Daniel and his father seemed to be estranged, but Auster wrote Daniel into his work.

In his 2004 novel, Oracle Night, the book is narrated by a writer named Trause, whose son is a drug addict who terrorizes his stepmother.

During a 2006 Guardian interview, Paul Auster’s second wife, Siri Hustvedt, who is also a writer, refused to talk about her stepson.

‘Yes. You know, I’m not going to talk about that, no. No,” she said, her eyes reportedly starting to water.

“You know, I’m married to a writer, and this – writing – is a strange endeavor.

‘It’s something we both strongly support.

“I’ve always had Paul’s back, and he’s always had my back.

“I have a very strong family.”

Auster grew up in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Jewish-Polish immigrants.

He moved to New York to attend Columbia University and after graduating spent four years in France, making a living from translations while he honed his craft as a writer.

He went through particularly dark times in the 1970s when he married and divorced four years later from American short story writer Lydia Davis, with whom he had Daniel.

‘I hit a wall with my work. I felt blocked and miserable, my marriage was falling apart, I had no money. I was done,” he told The New York Times in 1992.

The turning point came with the sudden death of his father, prompting Auster to write ‘The Invention of Solitude’, a haunting reflection on father-son relationships, a recurring theme in Auster’s work.

Published in 1982, it was a critical success and set Auster free with his writing.

The same year he married Hustvedt, forming one of New York’s most famous intellectual couples.

Auster and Hustvedt shared a daughter together, Sophie, who later became a singer and actor.

The author was better known in Europe than in his native United States: “Only a best-selling author in these parts,” said a 2007 New York magazine article.

“Auster is a rock star in Paris.”

In 2006 he received Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize for literature, and in 1993 he received the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan.

Following news of Auster’s death, fans took to Twitter/X to pay tribute to the late author.

One user wrote: ‘Oh man, so sad to hear that Paul Auster has passed away. Timbuktu is the best dog book ever, and I loved the Book of Illusions with all my heart. Full of gratitude for his contributions, fly on Paul Auster.”

Another added: ‘Devastated to hear of the passing of Paul Auster, one of my favorite contemporary authors, whose prose was matched only by his four-dimensional imagination. He will be greatly missed. May he rest in peace.’