Paula Fox (1923–) Biography

Born 1923, in New York, NY; (second marriage) Adam, Gabriel. Education: Attended Columbia University, 1955–58.

Addresses

Agent—Robert Lescher, 155 E. 71st St., New York, NY 10021.

Career

Novelist. Worked variously as a model; saleswoman; public-relations worker and machinist; Victor Gollancz (publisher), London, England, former staff member; reader for a film studio; reporter in Paris, France, and Warsaw, Poland, for British wire service Telepress; English-as-a-second-language instructor, and teacher at Ethical Culture School, New York, NY, and for emotionally disturbed children in Dobbs Ferry, NY; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, professor of English literature, beginning 1963.

Member

PEN, Authors League of America, Authors Guild.

Honors Awards

National Book Award finalist in children's book category, 1971, for Blowfish Live in the Sea; National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, 1972; Guggenheim fellowship, 1972; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1974; Newbery Medal, American Library Association, 1974, for The Slave Dancer; Hans Christian Andersen Medal, 1978; National Book Award nomination, 1979, for The Little Swineherd and Other Tales; New York Times Outstanding Books listee, 1980, and American Book Award for Children's Fiction Paperback, 1983, both for A Place Apart; Child Study Association (CSA) Children's Book Award, Bank Street College of Education, and New York Times Notable Books designation, both 1984, Christopher Award, and Newbery Honor Book selection, both 1985, and International Board on Books for Young People Honor List for Writing, 1986, all for One-Eyed Cat; Brandeis fiction citation, 1984; Rockefeller Foundation grant, 1984; The Moonlight Man selected among New York Times Notable Books, 1986, and CSA Children's Books of the Year, 1987; Silver Medallion, University of Southern Mississippi, 1987; Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for fiction, and Newbery Honor Book, 1989, for The Village by the Sea; Empire State Award for children's literature, 1994; O. Henry Prize, 2005, for short story "Grace."

Writings

FOR JUVENILES

Maurice's Room, illustrated by Ingrid Fetz, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1966.

A Likely Place, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1967.

How Many Miles to Babylon?, illustrated by Paul Giovanopoulos, David White, 1967.

The Stone-Faced Boy, illustrated by Donald A. Mackay, Bradbury Press (New York, NY), 1968, reprinted, Front Street Books (Asheville, NC), 2005.

Dear Prosper, illustrated by Steve McLachlin, David White, 1968.

Portrait of Ivan, illustrated by Saul Lambert, Bradbury Press (New York, NY), 1969, reprinted, Front Street Books (Asheville, NC), 2004.

The King's Falcon, illustrated by Eros Keith, Bradbury Press (New York, NY), 1969.

Hungry Fred, illustrated by Rosemary Wells, Bradbury Press (New York, NY), 1969.

Blowfish Live in the Sea, Bradbury Press (New York, NY), 1970.

Good Ethan, illustrated by Arnold Lobel, Bradbury Press (New York, NY), 1973.

The Slave Dancer, illustrated by Eros Keith, Bradbury Press (New York, NY), 1973.

The Little Swineherd and Other Tales, Dutton (New York, NY), 1978, new edition illustrated by Robert Byrd, 1996.

A Place Apart, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1980.

One-Eyed Cat, Bradbury Press (New York, NY), 1984.

(Author of introduction) Marjorie Kellogg, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1984.

The Moonlight Man, Bradbury Press (New York, NY), 1986, reprinted, Aladdin (New York, NY), 2003.

Lily and the Lost Boy, Orchard Books, 1987, published as The Lost Boy, Dent (London, England), 1988.

The Village by the Sea, Orchard Books (New York, NY), 1988, published as In a Place of Danger, 1989.

Monkey Island, Orchard Books (New York, NY), 1991.

(With Floriano Vecchi) Amzat and His Brothers: Three Italian Tales, illustrated by Emily Arnold McCully, Orchard Books (New York, NY), 1993.

Western Wind, Orchard Books (New York, NY), 1993.

The Eagle Kite, Orchard Books (New York, NY), 1995.

Radiance Descending, D.K. Ink (New York, NY), 1997.

FOR ADULTS

Poor George, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1967, with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, Norton (New York, NY), 2001.

Desperate Characters, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1970, with an afterword by Irving Howe, Nonpareil, 1980.

The Western Coast, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1972, with an introduction by Frederick Busch, Norton (New York, NY), 2001.

The Widow's Children, Dutton (New York, NY), 1976.

A Servant's Tale, North Point Press, 1984, with an introduction by Melanie Rehack, Norton (New York, NY), 2001.

The God of Nightmares, North Point Press (San Francisco, CA), 1990, with an introduction by Rosellen Brown, Norton (New York, NY), 2002.

OTHER

Borrowed Finery: A Memoir, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2001.

The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe (memoir), Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2005.

Also author of television scripts. Contributor to periodicals, including Paris Review.

Adaptations

Desperate Characters was adapted as a motion picture starring Shirley Maclaine, Paramount, 1970; a cassette and a film strip accompanied by cassette have been produced of One-eyed Cat by Random House.

Sidelights

Paula Fox is best known for her children's books, which have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the Newbery Medal, and an American Book Award. She is also the author of novels for adults, and has been described by Nation contributor Blair T. Birmelin as "one of our most intelligent (and least appreciated) contemporary novelists." Fox, however, does not feel the need to distinguish between these two types of writing. She commented in John Rowe Townsend's A Sense of Story: Essays on Contemporary Writers for Children, "I never think I'm writing for children, when I work. A story does not start for anyone, nor an idea, nor a feeling of an idea; but starts more for oneself." "At the core of everything I write," she explained to Publishers Weekly interviewer Sybil S. Steinberg, "is the feeling that the denial of the truth imprisons us even further in ourselves. Of course there's no one 'truth.' The great things, the insights that happen to you, come to you in some internal way."

Fox spent her childhood moving from place to place and school to school. She later recalled her alcoholic father in the New York Times as "an itinerant writer." Working in New York City, he earned a living by rewriting plays by other authors, as well as writing several of his own, and later he went to Hollywood and England to work for film studios. While her self-absorbed parents were traveling about, Fox was sent to live with Elwood Corning, a Congregational minister who took the baby girl into the home he shared with his invalid mother in New York's Hudson Valley. An avid reader, poet, and history buff, her beloved "Uncle El-wood" had a profound influence on Fox. The Reverend Corning taught her to read and to appreciate the works of authors like Rudyard Kipling, Eugene Field, Mark Twain, Washington Irving, and Walt Whitman; he also told her tales of the Revolutionary War and other events in history. All these stories inevitably rubbed off on the young Fox. "When I was five, I had my first experience of being a ghost writer—of sorts," she once related, recalling how the minister once accepted her suggestion to write a sermon about a waterfall. For "an instant," she added, "I grasped consciously what had been implicit in every aspect of my life with the minister—that everything could count, that a word, spoken as meant, contained in itself an energy capable of awakening imagination, thought, emotion." It was this experience that first inspired Fox to become a writer.

When Fox was six years old, her parents returned to reclaim her, and she moved to California where she was passed from her too-busy parents to a succession of family friends, institutions, and foster situations. In 1931 she relocated another great distance, this time to live with her grandmother on a sugar plantation in Cuba. Here, Fox quickly picked up Spanish from her fellow students while attending classes in a one-room schoolhouse. Three years after her arrival, the revolution led by Batista y Zaldivar forced Fox to return to New York City. By this time, she had attended nine schools and had hardly ever seen her parents. Fortunately, she found some solace and stability in her life by visiting public libraries. "Reading was everything to me," Fox revealed to Steinberg. "Wherever I went—except in Cuba—there was a library. Even though my schools changed, I'd always find a library."

Fox worked several different jobs after finishing high school, ranging from machinist to publishing company employee. Her desire to travel led her to a position as a stringer for a leftist British news service which assigned her to cover postwar Poland, Spain, Czechoslovakia, and France. Later, she returned to the United States, married, and had children, but the marriage ended in divorce. Afterwards, Fox resolved to finish her education, and attended Columbia University for four years, until she could no longer afford the expense and had to leave
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before receiving her degree. Fox's knowledge of Spanish now helped her find a job as an English teacher for Spanish-speaking children. She also found other teaching positions, including one as a teacher for the emotionally disturbed. In 1962, Fox married an English professor and moved to Greece for six months while her husband wrote on a Guggenheim fellowship.

It was during her trip to Greece that Fox finally began to realize her dream of becoming a writer. "I remember when I was finally able to quit my teaching job and devote myself full-time to writing. People asked me, 'But what will you do?' 'I'm going to write books,' I would say. And they would reply, 'Yes, but what will you DO?' People have this idea that a life spent writing is essentially a life of leisure. Writing is tremendously hard work. There is nothing more satisfying, but it is work all the same." For Fox, the same reason for reading books applies to her desire to write them: books help both reader and writer to experience and understand—if not necessarily sympathize with—the lives of other people. In her acceptance speech for the Newbery award, reprinted in Newbery and Caldecott Medal Winners, 1966–1975, she declared that writing helps us "to connect ourselves with the reality of our own lives. It is painful; but if we are to become human, we cannot abandon it." In time, the reality of Fox's own life expanded to include five new grandchildren in 1991, when Linda, the daughter she had given up for adoption, sought her birth mother out. One of those grandchildren is rock musician Courtney Love.

Fox's juvenile novels have a complexity and sincerity that make them popular with readers and critics alike. These books cover a wide range of subjects, including parental conflict, alcoholism, and death. Frequently, her young protagonists are emotionally withdrawn children who undertake a journey that is symbolic of their emotional development. In Blowfish Live in the Sea, for example, nineteen-year-old Ben travels from New York to Boston to see his estranged, alcoholic father after a twelve-year absence. Because of a past trauma involving a lie his father told him, Ben has withdrawn into himself to the point where he no longer speaks to anyone. His sister Carrie is the only family member who tries to reach out to Ben. The importance of Ben and Carrie's journey to Boston, explained a Horn Book reviewer, is that "each step … relays something further in their tenuous gropings towards an understanding of themselves and of others."

Other award-winning children's novels by Fox, such as A Place Apart, One-Eyed Cat, and The Village by the Sea, are similarly concerned with relationships, strong characterization, and emotionally troubled protagonists. New Statesman contributor Patricia Craig remarked that A Place Apart "depends on subtleties of characterisation … rather than on an arresting plot." The novel concerns Victoria Finch, a thirteen year old whose comfort and security are shaken when her father dies suddenly. Victoria's grief, wrote Washington Post Book
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World contributor Katherine Paterson, "is the bass accompaniment to the story. Sometimes it swells, taking over the narrative, the rest of the time it subsides into a dark, rhythmic background against which the main story is played." Victoria must also come to terms with her infatuation with Hugh, a manipulative boy who "exerts … a power over her spirit," according to Paterson. This relationship compels Victoria "to explore the difficult terrain between the desire for closeness and the tendency to 'make ourselves a place apart,'" observed Jean Strouse in Newsweek.

One-Eyed Cat, according to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Anita Moss, "is one of Fox's finest literary achievements." The title refers to a stray cat which the main character Ned accidentally injures with an air rifle. The guilt Ned feels afterward plagues him through most of the rest of the book, even making him physically ill at one point. At last he confesses his thoughtless act to his mother, who in turn confesses that she once deserted Ned and his father when he was younger. Recognizing that all people have flaws leads Ned to a reconciliation with his parents and himself.

A typical Fox device is to put a main character in an unfamiliar and hostile setting. In The Village by the Sea, for example, Emma is sent to live with her uncle and her neurotic, alcoholic aunt for two weeks when her father has to go to the hospital for heart surgery. Unable to cope with her hateful aunt and troubled about her father's health, Emma finds some solace in creating a make-believe village on the beach. But, as Rosellen Brown related in the New York Times Book Review, "Emma's miniature haven is ultimately beyond her protection. She can only cherish the building of it, and then the memory."

Of all her books, Fox is most often associated with her controversial yet highly acclaimed work The Slave Dancer, which won the 1974 Newbery Medal. It is the story of a New Orleans boy who is kidnapped and placed on a slave ship bound for West Africa. The boy, Jessie Bollier, is chosen for his ability to play the fife; his task aboard ship is to "dance" the slaves so they can exercise their cramped limbs. Eventually, Jessie escapes when the ship's crew is drowned in a storm, but he is forever scarred by his experience. Despite the praise the novel received, a number of critics complained that Fox's portrayal of slaves made them akin to merely dispirited cattle, and that she appeared to excuse the slave drivers as being victims of circumstance. Binnie Tate, for one, commented in Interracial Books for Children: "Through the characters' words, [Fox] … excuses the captors and places the blame for the slaves' captivity on Africans themselves. The author slowly and systematically excuses almost all the whites in the story for their participation in the slave venture and by innuendo places the blame elsewhere."

Other reviewers, however, viewed The Slave Dancer as a fair and humane treatment of a sensitive subject. In Horn Book, Alice Bach called the novel "one of the finest examples of a writer's control over her material…. With an underplayed but implicit sense of rage, Paula Fox exposes the men who dealt in selling human beings." The Slave Dancer, concluded Kevin Crossley-Holland in the New Statesman, is "a novel of great moral integrity…. From start to finish Miss Fox tells her story quietly and economically; she is candid but she never wallows."

Continuing her practice of placing her young protagonists in difficult circumstances, Fox, in Monkey Island, examines the issue of homelessness and explores the more general childhood fear of abandonment. The story concerns an eleven-year-old, middle-class boy named Clay Garrity, whose father loses his job as a magazine art director and abandons his family. Because his mother is eight months' pregnant and cannot work, Clay fears the social services department will take him away and put him in a foster home. "The novel individualizes the problems of homeless people and puts faces on those whom society has made faceless," remarked Ellen Fader in a Horn Book review. Fader felt "readers' perceptions will be changed after reading the masterfully crafted Monkey Island." Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Dinitia Smith called the novel "delicate and moving," and a "relentless story that succeeds in conveying the bitter facts" of homelessness.

In Western Wind Fox takes a rather well-worn premise in children's literature—a lonely young girl is sent by her parents to live with an elderly relative who proves to be quite wise—and making it original and interesting. This is achieved mainly by Fox's depiction of the young heroine's grandmother, an eccentric painter who lives on a remote island off the coast of Maine in a house without indoor plumbing. Though Booklist reviewer Ilene Cooper found Fox's "delicate craftsmanship" overdone, others praised the author's descriptive skills and emotional insights. Patricia J. Wagner, writing in the Bloomsbury Review, concluded that both "adult and junior fiction writers should study her work with care," and Betsy Hearne, in the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, observed that "Fox's style especially suits this taut narrative."

Homosexuality and AIDS are the issues Liam Cormac and his family must confront in The Eagle Kite, a novel
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that Horn Book writer Nancy Vasilakis hailed for its "painstaking honesty." Young Liam's father is dying from AIDS. The man's imminent death and the circumstances under which he contracted the disease cause the family almost unbearable grief; they also provide the narrative struggles through which some memorable characters are defined. In Voice of Youth Advocates, W. Keith McCoy described the book as "a brief, but intense, portion of one young boy's life," and further noted that "Fox's spare prose enhances the emotions that are buffeting the Cormacs."

Such emotional honesty is also displayed in Radiance Descending, the story of an adolescent boy struggling with his resentment toward a younger brother who has Down's syndrome. Having just moved to Long Island from New York City, Paul is eager to avoid Jacob, who nevertheless idealizes him. Paul is also frustrated at how Jacob monopolizes all their parents' attention. Slowly, however, Paul comes to realize that the mere fact of avoiding Jacob is still focusing on him, and that there may be a middle ground. "Older readers will find many layers of meaning in this novel," noted a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. "Younger readers may be put off by a few esoteric allusions … but will still be able to recognize the gradual blossoming of Paul's compassion." Edward Sullivan, writing in Voice of Youth Advocates, considered Radiance Descending "a quiet, introspective novel told with great eloquence."

Although Fox has not received as much recognition for her adult novels as she has for her children's books, she has nevertheless been widely praised for Desperate Characters and The Widow's Children, as well as for the memoirs Borrowed Finery and The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe. Her adult novels are "concerned with the cataclysmic moments of private lives, and the quiet desperation of ordinary people," wrote Linda Simon in Commonweal. Desperate Characters explores the lives of Sophie and Otto Bentwood, a childless couple in their mid-forties who are "facing the abstract menace of a world perhaps they helped through inadvertence to create," wrote John Leonard in the New York Times. The Bentwoods live in a renovated Brooklyn townhouse amid the squalor of a slum. While their marriage was described by New York Times Book Review contributor Peter Rowley as, "if not dead, at best warring," they are content with their orderly, comfortable lives. As the novel progresses, however, their security is gradually encroached upon. "Sophie and Otto … are slowly revealed to be menaced by forces … giving off a growl of danger all the more ominous for being so essentially nameless and faceless and vague," observed Pearl K. Bell in the New Leader. Bell concluded that Desperate Characters "is a small masterpiece, a revelation of contemporary New York middle-class life that grasps the mind of the reader with the subtle clarity of metaphor and the alarmed tenacity of nightmare."

In both Fox's children's and adult novels, her characters suffer through tragic situations for which there are Fox shares the childhood experiences that, while difficult, taught her much about human character and the importance of stability and a sense of belonging. (Cover design by Linda Fyfe.)no simple solutions, and this has led some critics to categorize her as an author of serious and depressing works. Fox has at times been frustrated by this label. "People are always saying my work is 'depressing,'" she told Feitlowitz. "But what does that mean? They said Desperate Characters was depressing too, and it's been reissued twice. I'm so used to having the word 'depressing' tied to me I feel like a dog accustomed to the tin can around its neck. The charge can still make me angry, not because of how it might reflect on my work, but because of what it tells me about reading in this country. Is Anna Karenina depressing? Is Madame Bovary? 'Depressing,' when applied to a literary work is so narrow, so confining, so impoverished and impoverishing. This yearning for the proverbial 'happy ending' is little more than a desire for oblivion."

A number of critics have defended Fox's approach to fiction, and have praised her ability to address her younger audience frankly. "What sets [Fox] above the gaudy blooms—the social workers and fortunetellers—who are knocking out books as fast as kids can swallow them," wrote Horn Book contributor Alice Bach, "is her uncompromising integrity. Fox is nobody's mouthpiece. Her unique vision admits to the child what he already suspects: Life is part grit, part disappointment, part nonsense, and occasionally victory…. And by offering children no more than the humanness we all share—child, adult, reader, writer—she acknowledges them as equals."

For Fox, writing for children is, except for a few considerations, not that different from writing for adults. "Children have everything adults have," the author told Feitlowitz, "with the exception of judgment, which comes only over the course of time." While she avoids writing detailed scenes for children involving sex, extreme violence, or subjects outside their experience like teenage pregnancy, Fox maintains that "children know about pain and fear and unhappiness and betrayal. And we do them a disservice by trying to sugarcoat dark truths. There is an odd kind of debauchery I've noticed, particularly in societies that consider themselves 'democratic' or 'liberal': they display the gory details but hide meaning, especially if it is ambiguous or disturbing." And so, above all else, Fox strives for honesty and integrity in her writing. She concluded, "We must never, ever try to pull the wool over children's eyes by 'watering down' powerful stories."

As Cathryn M. Mercier noted in an essay on Fox in the St. James Guide to Young-Adult Writers: "In every novel, Fox attributes significant capabilities to her readers. She pays tribute to their emotional, intellectual, and psychological abilities with layered, probing narratives, identifiable characters who achieve genuine illumination, and lucid, striking prose." As the acclaimed writer told London-based Guardian Unlimited online contributor Aida Edemariam, her approach reflects her experience of life. "I think what my growing up gave me was that I didn't just swim like a goldfish, unaware of anything—water, my environment," Fox told Edemariam. "I had leapt out of the bowl, so I could see in a certain way that is given to some people and not to others. I write mostly about children who, like me, are out of the bowl."