In 1931, when she was eight years old, the half-Spanish and half-Irish Fox went to live with her grandmother in Cuba. There she attended a one-room school and learned to speak Spanish fluently from other children. She also played on a village baseball team. When Fulgencio Batista began his rise to power in 1934, Fox returned to New York.
Fox has written that both before and after her stay in Cuba, she moved often, seldom living anywhere longer than a year. After returning from Cuba, she hardly saw her parents. By the age of twelve, she had attended nine different schools. Because of the chaotic conditions of her childhood, the young Fox often escaped into the peaceful solitude of the public library, where she read voraciously and began to nurture her writing talent.
Fox began to work at age seventeen and subsequently held many different and unusual jobs. She worked for a newspaper, as a machinist for Bethlehem Steel, for British publisher Victor Gollancz, as a reader for a movie company, and for a British news service in Paris and Warsaw. Probably her most unusual job was punctuating fifteenth-century Italian madrigals.
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