Life
Paula Fox was born in New York City on April 22, 1923. Her father, Paul Hervey Fox, wrote screenplays and taught English. Her mother was Elsie De Sola, a Cuban. He had another family after he divorced Elsie with his 2nd wife, Mary, consisting of 3 boys and a girl.
Paula's mother, Elsie De Sola Fox, rejected her at birth and left her in a foundling home. Her maternal grandmother, 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, the Cuban grandmother gave the infant to Reverend Elwood Corning and his bedridden mother in Balmville, New York.
The Reverend treated Paula kindly, teaching her important things along the way. Fox first visited her parents at the age of five, when her mother treated her like a prisoner in war. The reunion was so traumatic, she wrote in her memoir Borrowed Finery, "I sensed that if she could have hidden the act she would have killed me."
In 1944, Paula gave birth to a daughter out of wedlock. However, she gave the child up for adoption. This daughter, Linda Carroll, became an author and psychotherapist and gave birth to musician Courtney Love.
Fox later attended Columbia University, married Richard Sigerson, by whom she had 2 sons. She later married the 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 school teacher 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.
Read more about this topic: Paula Fox
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“The life of a repo man is always intense.”
—Alex Cox, British screenwriter. Miller (Tracy Walter)
“There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may have been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)