American prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter, Paul Auster, who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel, is dead. 

Mr Auster, who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died at his home in Brooklyn following complications from lung cancer. 

He was 77.

Mr Auster’s death was confirmed by his friend, Jacki Lyden.

He was often described as a “literary superstar” in news accounts with his hooded eyes, soulful air and leading-man looks. 

Before his death, he was often described as “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers,” by the Times. 

The prolific inventive writer was best known for his novels about New York. 

A native of New Jersey, Mr Auster was indelibly linked with the rhythms of his adopted city, which was a character of sorts in much of his work, particularly Brooklyn, where he settled in 1980 amid the oak-lined streets of brownstones in the Park Slope neighbourhood.

Mr Auster came to be seen as a guardian of Brooklyn’s rich literary past, as well as an inspiration to a new generation of novelists who flocked to the borough in the 1990s and later.

“Paul Auster was the Brooklyn novelist back in the ’80s and ’90s, when I was growing up there, at a time when very few famous writers lived in the borough,” the author and poet Meghan O’Rourke, raised in nearby Prospect Heights, said. 

Ms O’Rourke added, “His books were on all my parents’ friends’ shelves. As teenagers, my friends and I read Auster’s work avidly for both its strangeness, that touch of European surrealism — and its closeness.

“Long before ‘Brooklyn’ became a place where every novelist seemed to live, from Colson Whitehead to Jhumpa Lahiri, Auster made being a writer seem like something real, something a person actually did.”