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 middle-class parents were Jewish, of Austrian descent; the marriage was an unhappy one, and they divorced during Auster's senior year of high school, he moving with his mother and sister to an apartment at Weequahic, Newark.

While attending summer camp, the 14-year-old Auster witnessed what he called the "seminal experience" of his life:[12] a boy being struck by lightning and dying instantly.

[1] After returning to the United States in 1974, he continued to work on his poems, essays, and translations of French writers, such as Stéphane Mallarmé[17] and Joseph Joubert.

[22] Similar to the themes explored in The New York Trilogy, the search for identity and personal meaning continued to permeate the three novels Auster published in quick succession in the late 1980s.

[23][note 1] After a steadfast commitment to filmmaking during the late 1990s, Auster decided to turn his attention once again to writing novels, memoirs, and essays during the remaining two decades of his life.

"[30] Auster was willing to give Iranian translators permission to write Persian versions of his works in exchange for a small fee; Iran does not recognize international copyright laws.

[32] "Over the past twenty-five years", wrote Michael Dirda in The New York Review of Books in 2008, "Paul Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature".

[33] Dirda extolled his virtues in The Washington Post, attesting that Auster had "perfected a limpid, confessional style" and constructed suspenseful, sometimes autobiographical plots.

She praised the complex sense of wonder and gratitude in his works, which often features "sly humor" in an oeuvre which she considered "a grand experiment, not only in storytelling, but also in the endless nature-versus-nurture debate, the perpetual dance between inheritance and free will, intention and chance, dreams and fate.

He noted: "One reads Auster's novels very fast, because they are lucidly written, because the grammar of the prose is the grammar of the most familiar realism (the kind that is, in fact, comfortingly artificial), and because the plots, full of sneaky turns and surprises and violent irruptions, have what the Times once called 'all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller'.

[38] Daniel Auster was arrested on April 16, 2022, and charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month-old infant daughter Ruby, who consumed some of the heroin and fentanyl he was using.