Paula Fox

In the mid-1990s, she enjoyed a revival as her adult fiction was championed by a new generation of American writers. In 2011, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Fox is the biological mother of writer Linda Carroll and the biological grandmother of musician Courtney Love.

Paula Fox studied at Columbia University. The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are children's. Works named in the authority record are The Slave Dancer. Distinctions recorded are Newbery Medal, Guggenheim Fellowship, Zilveren Griffel and Hans Christian Andersen Award.

Paula Fox was born in New York City on April 22, 1923. Her mother, Elsie De Sola, was a Cuban screenwriter. Her father, Paul Hervey Fox, was a writer as well. Elsie De Sola Fox rejected Paula at birth, and she and her husband left Paula at a foundling home. Paula's maternal grandmother, Candelaria de Sola, rescued her. Unable at the time to provide a home for Fox herself, Candelaria gave the infant to Reverend Elwood Corning and his bedridden mother in Balmville, New York. Corning treated Fox kindly and taught her important lessons. When Fox first visited her parents at age five, her mother openly scorned her. As Fox wrote in her memoir Borrowed Finery, the reunion was so traumatic that she sensed that if her mother "could have hidden the act she would have killed me." Fox would later refer to her mother as a "sociopath." Fox was raised by a succession of relatives, friends, and paid caregivers. She attended high school for only five months. Fox attended the Columbia University School of General Studies from 1955 to 1958.

Fox 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 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". For her contributions as a children's writer, Fox won the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978, the highest international recognition for a creator of children's books. She 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 six novels went out of print in 1992. In the mid-1990s, she enjoyed a revival as her adult fiction was championed by a new generation of American writers. In 2011, Fox was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She was championed by the author Jonathan Franzen, who saw that some of her books were re-issued.

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. She became pregnant and gave the child, Linda Carroll, up for adoption. There have been persistent rumors that Brando was in fact Carroll's father, although neither Brando nor Fox ever commented on the matter. Carroll, who became an author and psychotherapist, is the mother of musician Courtney Love. Frances Bean Cobain is Fox's great-granddaughter. Fox married Richard Sigerson, by whom she had two sons. She later married literary critic and translator Martin Greenberg. Fox was mugged in Jerusalem in 1996 and suffered a head injury that affected her ability to write. Fox died at age 93 in Brooklyn on March 1, 2017.

A 1993 Portuguese feature film, Coitado do Jorge, was based on Poor George. Desperate Characters was made into a movie starring Shirley MacLaine in 1971.