Prizewinning US novelist Paul Auster has died of complications arising from lung cancer, aged 77. Auster, who was born in the US but celebrated world wide, died at his home in Brooklyn, New York, on Tuesday night.

Auster, who published 34 books throughtout his career, didn't always make things easy for readers. He confronted the big issues of life through his deliberate literary confusions and unfurled his stories in compound sentences, yet his books drew a large and devoted audience.

A bumpy start

Auster was born on February 3, 1947, in Newark, New Jersey to parents of Austrian Jewish descent. He was fascinated by books from an early age and started writing poetry as a child. He earned degrees in English and comparative literature from Columbia University in New York City before joining the merchant navy for six months, then following in James Joyce's footsteps in Ireland and settling in France in 1971. Auster worked as a translator in Paris for several years, during which time he met Irish writer Samuel Beckett, who had a huge influence on his own writing.

But Auster's own writing career had a bumpy start. After returning to the US in 1974, he wrote plays and published volumes of poetry that failed to find a wide audience. At best, he achieved critical praise in 1982 with the memoir "The Invention of Solitude.”

First success with "City of Glass”

To earn a living, Auster taught at Columbia University and later Princeton University, and........

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