Auster's first novel was a detective novel called Squeeze Play and was written under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin (Benjamin is his middle name).
Auster gained renown for a series of three experimental detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy (1987). These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, creating his own distinctively postmodern form in the process. The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications.
Later Auster's works concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Leviathan). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger than life schemes. Paul Auster is regarded by many critics as one of America's greatest living writers.