Paul Auster, the well-known writer of almost three dozen books, with Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions and The New York Trilogy on the list, and also the screenwriter of Wayne Wang’s Smoke and director of Lulu on the Bridge, has passed away.

The news of the death was confirmed by one of his friends, Jacki Lyden to the New York Times.

Auster died at the age of 77.

The artist debuted with a memoir titled The Invention of Solitude which won critical praise.

He got himself accepted as one of the most recognized authors of America with a series of three different stories, Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986).

All three of the stories, which were also loosely connected, were later collected in one publication as the The New York Trilogy.

“Ever since City of Glass, the first volume of his New York Trilogy, Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination,” critic Michael Dirda wrote of Auster’s work.