Paul Auster graduated from Columbia, during the years when the opposition to the Vietnam War was growing in American society and in universities in particular. In 1968, he was one of the students who protested against the conflict at the New York university. The protest had been going on for more than a month when, on the morning of April 30, the police entered Hamilton Hall and Low Library, armed with tear gas, to clear the buildings.

"The Vietnam War was driving everybody crazy", Paul Auster told Vanity Fair magazine 50 years later, about the occupation of the university. "Things were falling apart and there was a sense of chaos, nobody knew where we were going. The frustration of not being able to stop the war led me to the sundial [on the university's main avenue] that day".

Paul Auster died on Tuesday night, in Brooklyn, New York, when it was already Wednesday morning in Europe. He was 77 years old.

He is the writer of coincidence and chance, of the decisive moment when everything changes. His characters seem like projections of himself and, not infrequently, new plots reunite characters from previous novels, always woven in detail, in praise of the random and in a challenge to the improbability of everything that ends up happening.

At the beginning of "The Oracle Night", the protagonist of the story, the writer Sydney Orr, a survivor of an almost fatal illness, finds a blue Portuguese notebook, with a hard cover, in a stationery store in a city that can only be New York. He must abandon everything to rebuild an almost identical life elsewhere, in a whirlwind of fiction about fiction, in which the narrative is intertwined with marginal notes, which may seem real. "Words are dangerous", they can change reality, they can kill, Paul Auster will demonstrate to Sydney Orr.

The writer was born in Newark, New Jersey, on February 3, 1947, with the name Paul Benjamin Auster. He graduated from Columbia University in 1970, and lived the following four years in France, where he worked as a translator and prepared the webs of fiction.

He returned to the United States in 1974, with his first wife, the writer Lydia Davis, and settled in New York. He then began the regular publication of articles, stories and translated French authors such as Joseph Joubert - a writer from the turn of the 19th century, whose work is only outlined posthumously, through letters and small texts, in a reconstruction that does not fail to suggest a character of Auster himself.

Recognition came a decade later, in growing form, as he published "City of Glass", "Ghosts" and "The Locked Room", which he would later bring together in a single volume, as if they were "three movements of a single symphony", in the "New York Trilogy". Behind him was the crime writer Paul Benjamin, with the debut novel "Squeeze Play" (1984).

The first book, however, came from 1982, three years after his father's death. In "Inventing Solitude" (1982) he revisited his childhood, revealed that his paternal grandfather had been murdered by his grandmother and, from his relationship with his father, said that they had both lived on opposite sides of a wall. "A boy cannot live through these things without being affected by them as a man", wrote Auster.

The memories would be resumed years later in "Winter Journal" (2012) and in "Report from the Interior" (2013), a mosaic of a journey to adulthood and the beginning of his career as a writer, after "Hand to Mouth" (1997).

The year 1979 was also the year of Lydia Davis' divorce. Two years later, he met the writer Siri Hustvedt, with whom he lived the rest of his life. Auster's novel "Leviathan" (1992), about a man who accidentally blows himself up, has a character named Iris Vegan, the heroine of Hustvedt's first novel, "The Blindfold" (2003).

Auster's work includes two dozen novels, including "Moon Palace" (1989), "The Music of Chance" (1990), "The Book of Illusions" (2002), "Sunset Park" (2010), more than a dozen volumes of essays and non-fiction works, and a dozen books of poetry, which he first brought together in 2007.

He wrote for stage and cinema, such as "Smoke", directed by Wayne Wang and starring Harvey Keitel, and "Lulu on the Bridge" and "The Inner Life of Martin Frost", which he also directed.

In the essay "Why write?", for The New Yorker magazine, of December 17, 1995, the American writer confessed that his literary life actually began at the age of eight, when he failed to get an autograph from his baseball hero, Willie Mays, of the New York Giants, because neither he nor his parents had a pencil. Auster liked baseball, the randomness of the game, the way it was decided. He never stopped carrying a pencil with him.

The notion of chance would be reinforced later, when he was 14 years old and was at a summer camp, he recalled in the same essay. At the time, Ralph, a boy his age, was struck by lightning, in a meadow, a few meters away from where he was. Ralph was unconscious, but when years later Paul Auster used the incident in the novel "4 3 2 1", from 2017, it was fatal for one of the four versions of the protagonist, Archie Ferguson.

"Baumgartner", Paul Auster's last novel, was published last year, after he announced that he was being treated for cancer. The work focuses on Sy Baumgartner, a writer and philosophy teacher on the verge of retirement, who tries to survive the absence of his wife, the love of his life, who had died years before.

In early 2023, he published "Bloodbath Nation", with images by Spencer Ostrander, in which he reflected on the violence in the United States and the relationship of Americans to guns.

In 2017, when he was in Portugal, as part of the International Culture Festival, in Cascais, he spoke about the political panorama of his country, when Donald Trump was approaching his first year in the White House.

Auster considered him a "furious, irrational, unstable and narcissistic individual: a danger that feeds on the attention" that the world gives him. In the writer's view, it was up to "journalists to find out the truth about everything that is happening", starting from the principle that "good journalism" is the "most important work for the well-being of the world" - a profession that he saw "under attack", putting at risk "people's faith in the truth", at a time when journalists have never been so necessary.

Paul Auster, among many other distinctions, received the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, was made Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of France, in 2007, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

"Life is both tragic and funny, at once absurd and profoundly meaningful", wrote Paul Auster in the presentation of the film project "The Inner Life of Martin Frost", which Paulo Branco's Medeia Filmes co-produced in 2007, and which he recalls today, on his Facebook page.

"More or less unconsciously, I have tried to embrace this double aspect of experience in the stories I have written -- both in the novels and in the screenplays", continues Auster, quoted by Medeia Filmes. "I feel that it is the most honest and truthful way to look at the world and when I think of some of the writers I love most -- Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, Kafka, Beckett -- they were all masters at combining light and darkness, strangeness and familiarity."

Read Also: Editora em Portugal recorda Auster "culto, interessado e aberto ao mundo" (Portuguese version)