[1][2] She also won several awards for particular children's books including the 1974 Newbery Medal for her novel The Slave Dancer;[3][b] a 1983 National Book Award in category Children's Fiction (paperback) for A Place Apart;[4][c] and the 2008 Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis for A Portrait of Ivan (1969) in its German-language edition Ein Bild von Ivan.

[citation needed] Elsie De Sola Fox rejected her daughter Paula at birth and she and Paul left her in a foundling home.

Her maternal grandmother, Candelaria de Sola, 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, Candelaria gave the infant to Reverend Elwood Corning and his bedridden mother in Balmville, New York.

She later married literary critic and translator Martin Greenberg, and worked for years as a teacher and tutor for troubled children.

Desperate Characters 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".