Daniel Fuchs

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Daniel Fuchs (June 25, 1909 - July 26, 1993) was an American screenwriter, fiction writer, and essayist. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and wrote three early novels--Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), and Low Company (1937)--depicting Jewish life in the Williamsburg neighborhood of New York. Fuchs also wrote short stories and personal essays, mainly for The New Yorker. When he was 26, he moved to Los Angeles, California, to work on films.

Fuchs wrote the screenplay for the sexy crime noir Criss Cross (1949). He also penned the psychodrama Panic in the Streets (1950), which became an early success for director Elia Kazan. In 1995, Criss Cross was remade as The Underneath by director Steven Soderbergh, with credit given to Fuchs. Love Me or Leave Me, a biopic about the torch singer Ruth Etting, which won Fuchs an Oscar for Best Story in 1955, featured a performance by James Cagney in the role of a Chicago hoodlum.

John Updike has been quoted as saying, "Nobody else writes like Daniel Fuchs. I think of him as a natural—a poet who never had to strain after a poetic effect, a magician who made magic look almost too easy."^{[citation needed]}

The Golden West: Hollywood Stories, a collection of Fuchs's fiction and essays about Hollywood, was published in 2005.