Background information

Biographical information on Paul Auster

Paul Auster, the author of City of Glass, was born on the 3rd of February 1947. He has written several novels and essay collections. Most of his novels rely on metafiction and on the relationship between the author of a work, its characters, and its readers. City of Glass is one such example, as it even has a character named Paul Auster, who is also a writer and who shares many biographical traits with the real Paul Auster. Therefore, the character can be considered, in some way, a persona of the author. 

Auster’s first published work was a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude (1982). The book contains two parts. The first part, Portrait of An Invisible Man deals with Auster’s reflections about his recently deceased father. The second part, The Book of Memory contains reflections on topics such as coincidence, isolation, and fate, all of which play an important role in the novel City of Glass. Auster stated in an interview in BOMB magazine that The New York Trilogy – and, implicitly, City of Glass – grew directly out of themes ...