Paula Fox was born in New York City, on April 22, 1923. 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. They were busy with her father's career as a writer of plays and films and did not have time to raise her. The minister shared his love of reading, poetry, and history with her. 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. 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."

When she was six, she moved to California for two years and then was sent to live...