Paula Fox, who wrote novels for adults and for children, passed away on March 1 at age ninety-three in a hospital near her home in Brooklyn, New York.

Fox won the Newbery Award for her children’s book The Slave Dancer, a novel about the Atlantic slave trade in the mid-19th century. The award was not without controversy: “Her Newbery Medal for The Slave Dancer inspired a protest at the awards ceremony that year: The novel, which tells the story of a white New Orleans youth conscripted to play the fife on a slave ship in the 1840s, had been condemned by some reviewers for portraying the captured African slaves as a passive, undifferentiated group.”

Her novel Desperate Characters was made into a movie starring Shirley MacLaine and Kenneth Mars. This novel had fallen out of print until discovered by Jonathan Franzen and promotion by him led Norton to rerelease the book in 1999.

“The future author of Freedom and The Corrections came upon Desperate Characters while at the Yaddo writers colony in 1991. In a Harper’s magazine essay about American fiction, he called Desperate Characters an overlooked masterpiece,” the Associated Press reports. “Author Tom Bissell, then a paperback editor at W.W. Norton, read the essay and wondered why he hadn’t heard of the novel. He looked in stores, without luck, and finally got in touch with Fox, who sent him one of her copies. Norton has since reissued all of Fox’s adult novels, with introductory essays by Franzen and others.”

Besides her twenty works of fiction for children and six for adults, she wrote two memoirs, Borrowed Finery (2001), about her peripatetic childhood, and The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe. Her body of work in children’s literature earned her the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978.

Read her Art of Fiction interview with The Paris Review.

Photo Credit: Credit Ulf Andersen/Getty Images