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:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched seabeams glitter in the dark near the Tennhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.”
—David Webb Peoples, U.S. screenwriter, and Ridley Scott. Roy Batty, Blade Runner, final words before dying—as an android he had a built-in life span that expired (1982)
“There was a heavy power in her eyes which laid hold of his whole being, as if he had drunk some powerful drug. He had been feeling weak and done before. Now the life came back into him, he felt delivered from his own fretted, daily self.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 6:25.26.
Jesus.