The 100 Greatest Brooklynites of All Time: 30 to 21
When Auster moved to Park Slope in the 80s—it’s “like a miniature Upper West Side, it has that kind of bustle and density to it,” he told us two years ago—he’d already been living in Brooklyn a while, which is to say he’s lived here since before Kings County acquired its current reputation as a literary hot spot. Many of his books have been set in his home borough: Ghosts in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn Follies in Park Slope, Sunset Park in Sunset Park. As such, he might be our biggest literary booster, now that Lethem is gone and Ames’s show got canceled; in fact, an Italian scientist recently told us he moved to Brooklyn because he was such a big Paul Auster fan!