''In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts . . .''

Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, internationally best-selling novelist Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within, through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world, as well as through a selection of the revealing letters he sent to his first wife, acclaimed author Lydia Davis.

An impressionistic portrait of a writer coming of age, Report from the Interior moves from Auster''s baby''s-eye view of the man in the moon to his childhood worship of the movie cowboy Buster Crabbe to the composition of his first poem at the age of nine to his dawning awareness of the injustices of American life. Report from the Interior charts Auster''s moral, political and intellectual journey as he inches his way toward adulthood through the post-war fifties and into the turbulent 1960s.

Paul Auster evokes the sounds, smells, and tactile sensations that marked his early life - and the many images that came at him, including moving images (he adored cartoons, he was in love with films), until, at its unique climax, the book breaks away from prose into pure imagery: the final section of Report from the Interior recapitulates the first three parts, told in an album of pictures.

At once a story of the times and the story of the emerging consciousness of a renowned literary artist, this four-part work answers the challenge of autobiography in ways rarely, if ever, seen before.