Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American writer and film director. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His books have been translated into more than forty languages. Early life Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle-class parents, of Austrian descent, Queenie (née Bogat) and Samuel Auster. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, and Newark, and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood. Career After graduating from Columbia University with B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1970, he moved to Paris, France, where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to the United States in 1974, he has published poems, essays, and novels, as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert. Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir titled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. Although these books allude to the detective genre, they are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential questions of identity, space, language, and literature creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process. According to Auster, "...the Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude." The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or, increasingly, the relationships between people and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. Auster's more recent works, from Oracle Night (2003) to 4 3 2 1 (2017), have also met with critical acclaim. He was on the PEN American Center Board of Trustees from 2004 to 2009, and Vice President during 2005 to 2007. In 2012, Auster said in an interview that he would not visit Turkey, in protest of