According to Contemporary Authors Online (Gale, 2001), Avrich was born in New York City on August 4, 1931. He received a BA from Cornell University in 1952 and an MA and PhD from Columbia University in 1959 and 1961, respectively. He taught at Queens Colleege of the City University of New York, starting as an instructor in 1960 and rising to full professor in 1970. He was also a visiting assistant professor at Wesleyan University in 1961-62 and 1963-64 and at Columbia University in 1981. He was married in 1954.

Avrich received a travel grant to Russia from the Ford Foundation in 1960; he was a Guggenheim fellow and a senior fellow at the Russian Institute at Columbia University in 1967-68, and he was a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1972-73. He wrote eleven books on anarchist history in both Russia and the United States between 1961 and 1996, and he edited several volumes, including two collections of the writings of Peter Kropotkin. He was praised for his evocation of the milieu of the historical periods he wrote about and for his evenhanded treatment of controversial historical events in such books as Kronstadt 1921, an account of a workers' uprising near Leningrad, and The Modern School Movement, a history of schools established in the New York area based on the ideas of Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer. See below for a full list of his works.

I also tried searching Lexis Nexis to see if any obituaries for him would pop up, but I didn't come across any.

Works of Paul Avrich

• The Russian Revolution and the Factory Committees, (Ph.D. dissertation) Columbia University, 1961.
• The Russian Anarchists, Princeton University Press, 1967.
• Kronstadt 1921, Princeton University Press, 1970.
• Russian Rebels, 1600-1800, Schocken, 1972.
• (Editor and author of introduction) Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, Allen Lane, 1972.
• (Editor and author of introduction) Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution, Allen Lane, 1972.
• (Editor) The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution, Cornell University Press, 1973.
• An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre, Princeton University Press, 1978.
• The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States, Princeton University Press, 1980.
• (Author of introduction) Voltairine De Cleyre, The First Mayday: The Haymarket Speeches, 1895-1910, Libertarian Book Club, 1980.
• The Haymarket Tragedy, Princeton University, 1984.
• Bakunin & Nechaev, Freedom Press, 1987.
• Anarchist Portraits, Princeton University, 1988.
• Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Princeton University, 1991.
• Anarchist Voices: An Oral History Of Anarchism in Amreica, Princeton University, 1996.