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.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Oh sure, everyone goes back to the earth at some point, but life itself is a thread that is never broken, never lost. Do you know why? Because each man makes a knot in the thread during his lifetime: it is the work he has done and that’s what gives life to life in the long stretch of time: the usefulness of man on this earth.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“For my part, I would rather look toward Rutland than Jerusalem. Rutland,—modern town,—land of ruts,—trivial and worn,—not too sacred,—with no holy sepulchre, but profane green fields and dusty roads, and opportunity to live as holy a life as you can, where the sacredness, if there is any, is all in yourself and not in the place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children’s future—fear that they’ll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)