Paul Auster (born 1947) hails from Newark, New Jersey, but he is perhaps best known for The New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room), a collection of novels originally published separately in 1985 and 1986. Deploying an otherworldly approach in his detective fiction, Auster echoes predecessors like Raymond Chandler in elevating genre fiction to high literature. Though primarily a fiction writer, Auster has also written memoirs -- his debut book was 1982's The Invention of Solitude -- poetry, essays, and screenplays (including 1995's Smoke starring Harvey Keitel), as well translations of French literature. In 2017, he published 4 3 2 1: A Novel, about a boy born in 1947 in a Newark hospital who proceeds to lead four different lives simultaneously.