Paul Auster is an American novelist, essayist, translator, and poet whose complex mystery novels are often concerned with the search for identity and personal meaning. Auster earned his B.A. and M.A. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he discovered French poets and started his writing career as a poet, translator, and essayist. But he told Marcelle Thiebaux in Publishers Weekly, "My dream was always to write novels. Absolutely. From the beginning. Writing novels gives you the opportunity to explore all sides of yourself--more than anything else I can think of."

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. For years he labored in relative obscurity until the mid-1980s when he began to attract critical attention with his New York Trilogy, a trio of post-modern and experimental detective novels. Completed in 1987, the trilogy marked him as a talent to watch. 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.

Although the influence of American writers like Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville is evident in his fiction, other influences range from Montaigne, and Pascal to Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, and Beckett.

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 : Essays, Prefaces, Interviews (1982), and the novels The Music of Chance (1990) and Mr. Vertigo (1994). He also wrote the screenplay for the critically acclaimed films Smoke and Blue in the Face (1995) and Lulú on the Bridge (1998).

One of his most recent works is Timbuktu (1999).

He was also editor of the Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poets, and has translated works by Joan Miro, Jacques Dupin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Stephan Mallarme, and Jean Chesneux, among others. His awards include the chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993, Prix Medicis for foreign literature in the same year, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1990, and Ingram Merrill Foundation, PEN Translation Center, and National Endowment of the Arts fellowships.

He autorbusght in the creative writing program at Princeton University from 1986 to 1990.