Paula Fox

American author

Paula Fox (April 22, 1923 – March 1, 2017) was an American author of novels for adults and children and of two memoirs. For her contributions as a children's writer she won the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978, the highest international recognition for a creator of children's books. The NYSW Hall of Fame is a project of the Empire State Center for the Book. Her adult novels went out of print in 1992. In the mid nineties she enjoyed a revival as her adult fiction was championed by a new generation of American writers. Her father, Paul Hervey Fox, wrote screenplays 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. Visual artist Frances Bean Cobain is Fox's great granddaughter.

Fox attended the Columbia University School of General Studies from 1955 58 and married Richard Sigerson, by whom she had two sons. She later married 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 schoolteacher who finds purpose—and ruin—in mentoring a vagrant teenager. The Writers Hall of Fame is a project of the Empire State Center for the Book.

A Portuguese Feature Film Coitado do Jorge based on Poor George was directed by Jorge Silva Melo in 1993. Desperate Characters was made into a movie starring Shirley MacLaine in 1971.