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 the Lower East Side, Manhattan, but his family migrated to Williamsburg, Brooklyn while Fuchs was an infant. He wrote three early novels--Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), and Low Company (1937)--the earlier two of these depicting Jewish life in Williamsburg, the last focusing on various ethnic types in Brighton Beach. A single volume of these three novels, entitled The Brooklyn Novels, was published in 2006 by Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher. His style is naturalistic and sincere, with occasional dips into the sardonic (Summer in Williamsburg) and the solemn (Low Company). Fuchs' point of view is always sceptical and independent--in the manner of a Brooklyn Chekhov--and the author's limited reputation (as well as, perhaps, his reduced literary ambition) are plausibly ascribed to the fact that after three fine novels, there wasn't much appeal in being even a Chekhov in Brooklyn. Homage to Blenholt concerns a well-meaning tenement schlemiel who hopes to escape poverty via various inventions and get-rich quick schemes (self-sustaining parachutes, bottled onion juice, etc.); John Updike considered it Fuchs's "best work." Other important Fuchs supporters and critics are Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler. Fuchs also wrote short stories and personal essays, mainly for The New Yorker. When he was 26, he moved to Los Angeles, California, evidently without regret, 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 and Doris Day as the beleaguered songstress.

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." (New Yorker Magazine, 1971; cf. Updikes', 'Picked-Up Pieces', 1975)

Fuchs' short Hollywood novel, "West of the Rockies", was published in 1971, and in 1979 appeared a collection of mostly earlier-written short stories, "The Apathetic Bookie Joint". The Golden West: Hollywood Stories, a collection of Fuchs's fiction and essays about Hollywood, was published in 2005 by Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher.