I was saddened to read about the death of the great American writer Paul Auster, who succumbed due to complications arising from lung cancer, aged 77. Auster, who has been celebrated as one of the most important American authors of the last half century, is seen as the quintessential New Yorker, but was born across the harbor in Newark, New Jersey.

Auster, who published more than 30 books throughout his 50 year literary career, didn’t always make things simple for readers. He always tackled the important issues of humanity through his challenging prose styles and content.

To earn a living, Auster taught at Columbia University and later Princeton University, and worked translating and publishing French authors, including Jean-Paul Sartre. He sent the manuscript of the novel “City of Glass” to 17 publishers, all of whom turned it down. It was finally released by a small publisher in California in 1985 and promptly hit the bestseller list, as did his next two novels, “Ghosts” (1986) and “The Locked Room” (1986).

Those three books form Auster’s “New York Trilogy,” which all begin like classic detective stories but then develop plots that pose existential questions. They earned Auster a reputation as a heavy hitter in contemporary US literature.

He continued to write, tirelessly. “In the Country of Last Things” (1987) is a dystopian epistolary novel describing the world from the point of view of a homeless woman. “Moon Palace” (1989) deals with a search for identity. Further works include “Leviathan” (1992), “The Book of Illusions” (2002), “Oracle Night” (2003), “Man in the Dark” (2008), “Sunset Park” (2010), and “4 3 2 1” (2017).

Not content to limit himself to literature, Paul Auster also turned his hand to film. He wrote the screenplay for the movie “Smoke,” directed by Wayne Wang, which won the Silver Bear award at the 1995 Berlin Film Festival. He even directed films himself, including 2007’s “The Inner Life of Martin Frost,” which originated as a fictional movie about an author, described in Auster’s novel “The Book of Illusions.”

Auster was a leading political activist in the New York literary set. He and his wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, were among the co-founders of the organization Writers Against Trump, which was renamed Writers for Democratic Action after the election of Joe Biden. The group is committed to social justice and civil rights, including voter rights. Auster said he felt that the danger that the candidate with fewer votes could still win was the biggest threat to democracy, along with the deep divisions among the population of the US.