Linvention de la solitude paul auster biography

1982 memoir by Paul Auster

The Invention of Solitude is Paul Auster's debut memoir, published in 1982. The book is divided into two parts. The first part, Portrait of an Invisible Man, is about the sudden death of Auster's father. The second part, The Book of Memory, is a narrative in the third person.

Development

Samuel Auster, the father of American writer Paul Auster, died in January 1979.^[1] Shortly after receiving word of Samuel Auster's death, Paul Auster resolved to write a book about his father, thinking that if he didn't, Samuel Auster's "life will vanish along with him".^[2]

In the course of writing, Auster struggled for months to write the second part of what would become The Invention of Solitude with a first person point of view; he ultimately instead narrated it in the third person.^[3]

Publication

Sun published The Invention of Solitude in New York in 1982.^[4] It was