How does one become a writer? For Paul Auster, it all began at the age of eight. "At that moment in my life, nothing was more important to me than baseball," he recounted in the essay Why Write, published in the New Yorker in 1995. He particularly admired the "incandescent" Willie Mays, one of the New York Giants. One day, after a game, he met his idol and asked for his autograph. "Sure, kid," replied Mays. "Got a pencil?" The boy had nothing to write with. Neither did his father. Nor did anyone else nearby. "Sorry, kid," Mays said. "Ain’t got no pencil, can’t give no autograph." Auster burst into tears. "After that night, I started carrying a pencil with me wherever I went. As I like to tell my children, that's how I became a writer."

Nearly seven decades later, the kid with the pencil passed away in his Brooklyn home on the evening of Tuesday, April 30, as first reported in the New York Times. He was 77, with some 40 books behind him, translated into over 40 languages. Not only a novelist, but also a poet, translator, critic, essayist and screenwriter, the author of Moon Palace (1990), Leviathan (1993), Man in the Dark (2009) and Baumgartner (2024) had written thousands of pages, becoming a key figure in American literature. One of the most brilliant of his generation, he was also perhaps the most Francophile. An artist in the art of storytelling, he drew on his childhood, his history, what he called his "interior," to nourish his novels, autobiographies and even political texts with extreme intelligence and sensitivity. Like no other, he knew how to retrace the lives of his characters, or his own, in all their breadth, contradictions, twists and turns, sometimes linked to apparent coincidences.

His wife, Siri Hustvedt, also a writer, announced in March 2023 that he was suffering from cancer, diagnosed in December after several months of illness. Auster was treated at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. "I have been living in a place I have come to call Cancerland," wrote Hustvedt on Instagram in March 2023. "Living with someone who has cancer and is being bombed with chemotherapy and immunotherapy is an adventure in closeness and separation."

In 1982, Auster entered the literary scene with the story of another separation, the sudden death of his father three years earlier. "Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation," he wrote in the opening paragraph of his first book, The Invention of Solitude, where he attempted to define who his father was. "But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along."

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