Of her parents, she told Sybil Steinberg in Publishers Weekly only that her mother was very young and was unable to take on the responsibility of a child.

By the time she was twelve, she had already attended nine different schools and hardly knew her parents. Three years later, the revolution in Cuba forced her to leave, and she returned to New York City with her grandmother. When she was six, she moved to California for two years and then was sent to live with her grandmother on a sugar plantation in Cuba, where she went to school in a one-room schoolhouse and quickly learned to speak Spanish. She told a New York Times writer, 'I grasped … that everything could count, that a word, spoken as meant, contained in itself an energy capable of awakening imagination, thought, emotion.' At age five, she had her first experience with the thrill of writing when she suggested to the minister that he write a sermon about a waterfall, and he agreed. The minister shared his love of reading, poetry, and history with her. They were busy with her father's career as a writer of plays and films and did not have time to raise her. When Fox was five, her parents sent her to live with a minister and his bedridden mother in upstate New York while her parents traveled. Paula Fox was born in New York City, on April 22, 1923. However, most reviewers agree that Fox has impeccable control of the English language The Slave Dancer, like her other books, has been widely praised for the poetry of Fox's prose, her rich imagery, and her mythic storytelling, as well as her deft handling of a topic many people previously considered too horrific for children to read about.

In addition, several characters in the book are racists, and their language and attitudes offended some readers. Some critics believed it was racist and that it portrayed slaves unfairly, as despairing, weak people unable to fight for themselves, and, indeed, as responsible for their own enslavement.

The book won the Newbery Medal in 1974, and Fox has also won the Hans Christian Andersen medal for her work.ĭespite this praise, the book has also been the subject of controversy. The book tells the story of thirteen-year-old Jessie Bollier, who in 1840 is kidnapped from his New Orleans home and forced to play his fife on a slave ship while the slaves are 'danced,' or exercised.

She writes fiction for children and novels for adults, and of all her books, The Slave Dancer has been the most widely praised and recognized. Paula Fox did not begin writing until 1962 when she was thirty-nine years old, but since then she has enjoyed critical acclaim and praise from the many readers of her books.

The slave dancer by paula fox