Paula Fox (1923–2017)
Author of The Slave Dancer
About the Author
Paula Fox was born in Manhattan, New York on April 22, 1923. She briefly studied piano at the Juilliard School and spent 3 years at Columbia University but didn't graduate. Before becoming a writer, she worked as a salesgirl, a model, a worker in a rivet-sorting shop, a lathe operator at Bethlehem show more Steel, and a teacher of troubled children. She wrote books for children and adults. Her children's books included Maurice's Room, Traces, Blowfish Live in the Sea, One-Eyed Cat, and The Eagle Kite. She received the Newbery Medal for The Slave Dancer in 1974 and the Hans Christian Andersen Award for her body of children's work in 1978. Her books for adults include Poor George, The Widow's Children, A Servant's Tale, and The God of Nightmares. Desperate Characters was adapted into a film starring Shirley MacLaine and Kenneth Mars. She also wrote two memoirs entitled Borrowed Finery and The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe. She died on March 1, 2017 at the age of 93. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Paula Fox poses at her home January 13, 2007 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City
Works by Paula Fox
Associated Works
Who's Writing This? Notations on the Authorial I, with Self-Portraits {not Antæus} (1995) — Contributor — 75 copies
How I Learned to Cook and Other Writings on Complex Mother-Daughter Relationships (2004) — Contributor — 62 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1923-04-22
- Date of death
- 2017-03-01
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Columbia University
Julliard School - Occupations
- novelist
children's book author
memoirist - Organizations
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature, 2004)
- Awards and honors
- Hans Christian Andersen Award (Writing, 1978)
American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature, 2004)
New York State Writers Hall of Fame (2011) - Relationships
- Fox, Paul Hervey (father)
Carroll, Linda [2] (daughter)
Love, Courtney (granddaughter)
Greenberg, Martin (husband)
Greenberg, Clement (brother-in-law) - Short biography
- Abandonnée par ses parents dès sa naissance, elle atterrit dans un orphelinat, avant d'être récupérée par sa grand-mère à Cuba, puis par un pasteur en Floride, qui lui donne le goût de la littérature.
Après de premières études sacrifiées, elle exerce de nombreux petits jobs : peintre sur faïence, vendeuse, professeur de danse, métallo, journaliste. Sur le tard, elle fera des études de lettres à l'Université Columbia de New York.
Elle a écrit une trentaine d'ouvrages pour enfants ("Le Cerf-volant brisé", "L'Ile aux singes", "Vent d'ouest", "L'Oeil du chat") et a reçu le Prix Andersen 1978 pour l'ensemble de cette œuvre.
Elle publiera également six romans, notamment "Personnages désespérés", "Le Dieu des cauchemars", "La Légende d'une servante". Elle a aussi écrit ses mémoires : "Borrowed Finery".
Après une vingtaine d'années d'oubli, elle est redécouverte par l'écrivain Jonathan Franzen ("Les Corrections"), qui intéresse les éditeurs à la republier. - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Manhattan, New York, New York, USA
- Places of residence
- New York, New York, USA
- Place of death
- Brooklyn, New York, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- New York, New York, USA
Members
Discussions
YA, girl visits aunt (& uncle?) by ocean, makes sand city in Name that Book (March 2013)
Reviews
I love the episodic memoir style as it seems most true to how memory actually works, as opposed to a continuous narrative. I especially love Fox's sensitive, yet understated, description of some harrowing events and experiences, with special attention to those people who found (imperfect) ways of being there for her and spare yet insightful descriptions of characters. It was a pretty quick read but one that will stick with me.
I'm so glad I found my way to this book, and Paula Fox...Desperate Characters is a book of its time, yet timeless, the writing is elegant and brave, the mood feels claustrophobic, but at times hilarious in spite of the tension, the desperation. Otto and Sophie are in that middle-age landscape, the low valley between young and old, feeling a loss as it seems the world moves on in spite of them, their efforts, their frustration with others around them and a chain reaction of events that start show more with a stray cat biting Sophie's hand threatens to undo the relative peace they thought they had, suffering quietly in their discontent, but they snap with occasional outbursts that momentarily stuns them... silent forgiveness and denial moves them onward. It is a mysterious little book, but it's all there...a thin slice of life, pared down to simplicity. It's beautiful, I loved it, and will go back to it many times. show less
"...she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs, even as at struck at her with extended claws, smiling right up to that second when it sunk its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward, stunned and horrified...."
Otto and Sophie Bentwood live in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. Otto is in the process of dissolving his longtime law partnership with Charlie Russell. Cracks are beginning to show in Otto and Sophie's show more marriage, and outside, all around are signs that civil society is falling apart.
One evening after dinner, Sophie gives a saucer of milk to a stray cat on their back porch. As she bends down to pet the cat, it viciously bites her. Over the next three days she ponders, Will she get rabies and die? or Will nothing happen? Sophies ambivalence was said, by Jonathan Franzen in the forward to the edition I read, to resemble Hamlet, a "morbidly self-conscious character who receives a disturbing and ambiguous message, undergoes torments while trying to decide what the message means...." Over the three days as Sophie tries to decide what to do, then waits test results, the book builds enormous suspense. I found the writing to be exquisite, and I underlined many phrases. (I will probably put a few at the end of this review). I will definitely be searching for more to read by Paula Fox
4 1/2 stars
Incidentally David Foster Wallace called this book "A towering landmark of postwar Realism." And Jonathan Franzen says this book and Fox are better than her contemporaries Updike, Roth, and Bellow.
First line: "Mr. and Mrs. Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously."
Last lines: "The voice from the telephone went on and on like gas leaking from a pipe. Sophie and Otto had ceased to listen. Her arms fell away from his shoulders as they both turned slowly to the wall, turned until they could both see the ink running down to the floor in black lines...."
Here are a few more quotes:
"What the owners on the street lusted after was recognition of their superior comprehension of what counted in this world, and their strategy for getting it combined restraint and direction."
"All around them were official buildings, with the peculiarly threatening character. of large carnivorous animals momentarily asleep."
Otto and Charlie were like "smiling people in a swimming pool, kicking each other under water."
"She had only recently realized that one was old for a very ong time." show less
Otto and Sophie Bentwood live in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. Otto is in the process of dissolving his longtime law partnership with Charlie Russell. Cracks are beginning to show in Otto and Sophie's show more marriage, and outside, all around are signs that civil society is falling apart.
One evening after dinner, Sophie gives a saucer of milk to a stray cat on their back porch. As she bends down to pet the cat, it viciously bites her. Over the next three days she ponders, Will she get rabies and die? or Will nothing happen? Sophies ambivalence was said, by Jonathan Franzen in the forward to the edition I read, to resemble Hamlet, a "morbidly self-conscious character who receives a disturbing and ambiguous message, undergoes torments while trying to decide what the message means...." Over the three days as Sophie tries to decide what to do, then waits test results, the book builds enormous suspense. I found the writing to be exquisite, and I underlined many phrases. (I will probably put a few at the end of this review). I will definitely be searching for more to read by Paula Fox
4 1/2 stars
Incidentally David Foster Wallace called this book "A towering landmark of postwar Realism." And Jonathan Franzen says this book and Fox are better than her contemporaries Updike, Roth, and Bellow.
First line: "Mr. and Mrs. Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously."
Last lines: "The voice from the telephone went on and on like gas leaking from a pipe. Sophie and Otto had ceased to listen. Her arms fell away from his shoulders as they both turned slowly to the wall, turned until they could both see the ink running down to the floor in black lines...."
Here are a few more quotes:
"What the owners on the street lusted after was recognition of their superior comprehension of what counted in this world, and their strategy for getting it combined restraint and direction."
"All around them were official buildings, with the peculiarly threatening character. of large carnivorous animals momentarily asleep."
Otto and Charlie were like "smiling people in a swimming pool, kicking each other under water."
"She had only recently realized that one was old for a very ong time." show less
This was a dark and foreboding read about a comfortably well-off New York couple and the seeping uncontrollable infiltration of the ugly side of the world into their lives. At the beginning the wife is bitten by a stray cat, and as the bite gets steadily worse she sees it as an ominous omen about all that's becoming unhinged in their lives, from the encroachment of the poorer part of their Brooklyn neighbourhood on their home to the collapse of her husband's business partnership and a sense show more of unexplained destabilisation between the couple.
The writing was cleverly unsettling which I enjoyed; you're not sure where Fox is ultimately taking you, but you know that it's not going to be somewhere pink and fluffy. There's the sense that the couple themselves can't get a grip on their own emotions, which leaves us discombobulated and unsure as readers.
This isn't a novel that particularly goes anywhere plot-wise, but it's stylishly written quicksand and a dark snapshot of an elitist white middle-class marriage in an evolving 1960s New York.
I appreciated and enjoyed this novel, and can see how it would be a great novel for literary criticism, but I doubt I'll spend too much time looking back on it.
3.5 stars - a short, dark and unsettling ride. show less
The writing was cleverly unsettling which I enjoyed; you're not sure where Fox is ultimately taking you, but you know that it's not going to be somewhere pink and fluffy. There's the sense that the couple themselves can't get a grip on their own emotions, which leaves us discombobulated and unsure as readers.
This isn't a novel that particularly goes anywhere plot-wise, but it's stylishly written quicksand and a dark snapshot of an elitist white middle-class marriage in an evolving 1960s New York.
I appreciated and enjoyed this novel, and can see how it would be a great novel for literary criticism, but I doubt I'll spend too much time looking back on it.
3.5 stars - a short, dark and unsettling ride. show less
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