In 2011, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.[6] The NYSW Hall of Fame is a project of the Empire State Center for the Book.[7] Her adult novels went out of print in 1992. In the mid nineties she enjoyed a revival as her adult fiction was championed by a new generation of American writers.[8]
Early life
Paula Fox was born in New York City on April 22, 1923. Her mother, Elsie De Sola, was Cuban and a screenwriter.[9] Her father, Paul Hervey Fox, wrote screenplays[9] and taught English. After he divorced Elsie, he had 3 sons and a daughter with his second wife, Mary.[citation needed]
Elsie De Sola Fox rejected her daughter Paula at birth and she and Paul left her in a foundling home. Her maternal grandmother, Candelaria de Sola, temporarily visiting New York City, rescued her and she was moved around Florida, Cuba and the US. Unable at the time to provide a home herself, Candelaria gave the infant to Reverend Elwood Corning and his bedridden mother in Balmville, New York.[10]
Corning treated Fox kindly and taught her important lessons. When she first visited her parents at age five, her mother openly scorned her. As she wrote in her memoir Borrowed Finery, the reunion was so traumatic that "I sensed that if she could have hidden the act she would have killed me."[11]
In 1943, Fox was living in the household of famed acting coach Stella Adler and became friendly with Marlon Brando, another of Adler's students who was living there.[12][13] She became pregnant and gave the child, Linda Carroll, up for adoption.[9][14] There have been persistent rumors that Brando was in fact Carroll's father,[15] although neither Brando nor Fox ever commented on the matter.[16][17] Carroll, who became an author and psychotherapist, is the mother of musician Courtney Love. Visual artist Frances Bean Cobain is Fox's great-granddaughter.[18]
Career
Fox attended the Columbia University School of General Studies from 1955-58 and married Richard Sigerson, by whom she had two sons. She later married literary critic and translator Martin Greenberg, and worked for years as a teacher and tutor for troubled children. Only in her 40s did she begin her first novel, Poor George, about a cynical schoolteacher who finds purpose—and ruin—in mentoring a vagrant teenager.[19] The novel was received well (Bernard Bergonzi in the New York Review of Books calling it "the best novel I've read in a long time") but sold poorly, a pattern that all her adult novels would follow. Desperate Characters came next with Alfred Kazin calling it a "brilliant performance" and "quite devastating" while Lionel Trilling described it as "a reserved and beautifully realized novel". By 1992 all six of her novels were out of print.[11]
In 2011 she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.[20] The Writers Hall of Fame is a project of the Empire State Center for the Book.[7] She was championed by the author Jonathan Franzen, who saw that some of her books were re-issued.[9]
Fox died at age 93 in Brooklyn on March 1, 2017.[21]
^ abBeside winning the Newbery Medal for The Slave Dancer in 1974, Fox was a runner-up for One-Eyed Cat in 1985. Runner-up books are termed Newbery Honor Books and may display a silver seal.[3]
^ abcBefore winning the 1983 children's paperback fiction award for A Place Apart, Fox was a finalist for the overall National Book Award, Children's Literature with Blowfish Live in the Sea in 1971 and The Little Swineherd in 1979.
• "National Book Awards – 1970". NBF. Retrieved 2012-02-08. (Select 1971 and 1979 from the top left menu.)
^ abcBesides winning the overall Children's Book prize in 2008 (Ein Bild von Ivan; A Portrait of Ivan, 1969), Fox made the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis Youth Book shortlist in 1988 (Der Schattentänzer; The Slave Dancer, 1974) and Children's Book shortlist in 2002 (Paul ohne Jacob; Radiance Descending, 1997, featuring a brother's Downs syndrome). For the latter and another book by Fox (Jenseits der Lügen; The Eagle Kite, 1995, featuring a father's homosexuality and AIDS) Cornelia Krutz-Arnold won a special prize for translation in 2002.
• (Paula Fox, all listings). DJLP.
^(Paula Fox, all listings). Datenbanksuche (database search). Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (DJLP). Arbeitskreis für Jugendliteratur (Jugend literatur). Retrieved July 16, 2013. For general information select "Infos zum Preis" or "English key facts".
