Paula Fox (born April 22, 1923) is an American writer of novels for adults and children and of two memoirs. For her contributions as a children’s writer she won the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978, the highest international recognition for a creator of children’s books. She has also won several awards for particular children’s books including the 1974 Newbery Medal for her novel The Slave Dancer; a 1983 National Book Award in category Children’s Fiction (paperback) for A Place Apart; and the 2008 Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis for A Portrait of Ivan (1969) in its German-language edition Ein Bild von Ivan.

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.

Paula Fox was born in New York City on April 22, 1923. Her mother, Elsie De Sola, was Cuban. Her father, Paul Hervey Fox, wrote screenplays and taught English. After he divorced Elsie, he had 3 sons and a daughter with his second wife, Mary.
Elsie De Sola Fox rejected her daughter Paula at birth and left her in a foundling home. Her maternal cuban 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.
The Reverend treated Paula kindly and taught her important lessons.

In 1944, Paula was living in the household of famed acting coach Stella Adler and became friendly with another of Adler’s students who was living there, Marlon Brando. There have been persistent rumors that when Paula became pregnant during this time, Brando fathered the child. Neither Fox nor Brando ever addressed the rumours and Fox never stated who was the child’s father, although Brando later remarked that he “fathered several children” during said period. Paula gave the child up for adoption. This daughter, Linda Carroll, became an author and psychotherapist and gave birth to musician Courtney Love. Visual artist Frances Bean Cobain is Fox’s great-granddaughter.

PAULA FOX

MARLON BRANDON

LINDA CARROLL

Fox later attended Columbia University and married Richard Sigerson, by whom she had 2 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. 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, an acknowledged masterpiece, 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.

She was championed by the author Jonathan Franzen, who saw that some of her books were re-issued. She now lives in Brooklyn.

Works.
Children’s fiction.

1966 Maurice’s Room (illustrated by Ingrid Fetz)
1967 How Many Miles to Babylon? (illus. Paul Giovanopoulos)
1967 A Likely Place (illus. Edward Ardizzone)
1968 Dear Prosper (illus. Steve McLachlin)
1968 The Stone-Faced Boy (illus. Donald A. Mackay)

1969 Hungry Fred (illus. Rosemary Wells)
1969 The King’s Falcon (illus. Eros Keith)
1969 Portrait of Ivan (illus. Saul Lambert)
1970 Blowfish Live in the Sea
1973 Good Ethan (illus. Arnold Lobel)
1974 The Slave Dancer (illus. Eros Keith)
1978 The Little Swineherd and Other Tales (1996 edition illus. Robert Byrd)
1980 A Place Apart
1984 One-Eyed Cat
1986 The Moonlight Man ISBN 0-02-735480-6
1987 Lily and the Lost Boy (also as The Lost Boy) ISBN 0-531-08320-9
1988 The Village by the Sea (also as In a Place of Darkness)
1991 Monkey Island
1993 Western Wind
1995 The Eagle Kite (also as The Gathering Darkness)
1997 Radiance Descending
1999 Amzat and His Brothers: Three Italian Tales

Memoirs.

2001 Borrowed Finery
2005 The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe

Adult fiction.

1967 Poor George
1970 Desperate Characters
1972 The Western Coast
1976 The Widow’s Children
1984 A Servant’s Tale
1990 The God of Nightmares
2011 News from the World: Stories and Essays

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The Cuban History, Hollywood.
Arnoldo Varona, Editor.

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