In some ways, his detour into film was the culmination of a dream he had as a youth. In his early 20s, Mr. Auster had considered going to film school in Paris, as he told the director Wim Wenders in 2017 in Interview magazine.
“The reason I didn’t pursue it was, fundamentally, that I was so grotesquely shy at that point in my life,” he said. “I had such difficulty speaking in front of a group of more than two or three people that I thought, “How can I direct a film if I can’t talk in front of others?”
Son of a Landlord
Paul Benjamin Auster was born on Feb. 3, 1947, in Newark, the elder of two children of Samuel and Queenie (Bogat) Auster. His father was a landlord who owned buildings in Jersey City with his brothers.
Paul grew up in South Orange, N.J., and later nearby Maplewood, but his home was not a happy one, he wrote. His parents’ marriage was strained, and his relationship with his father remote. “It was not that I felt he disliked me,” Mr. Auster wrote in “The Invention of Solitude.” “It was just that he seemed distracted, unable to look in my direction.”
He took refuge in baseball, a lifelong passion, as well as books. “When I was 9 or 10,” he told The Times in 2017, “my grandmother gave me a six-volume collection of books by Robert Louis Stevenson, which inspired me to start writing stories that began with scintillating sentences like this one: ‘In the year of our Lord 1751, I found myself staggering around blindly in a raging snowstorm, trying to make my way back to my ancestral home.’”