Daniel Fuchs was born to a Jewish family on the Lower East Side, Manhattan, but his family moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn while Fuchs was an infant. He wrote three early novels, published by the Vanguard Press — Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt, and Low Company. The earlier two of these depicted Jewish life in Williamsburg; the last focused on various ethnic types in Brighton Beach. A single-volume edition of these was published by Basic Books in 1965 under the title "Three Novels." Subsequent one-volume editions include The Brooklyn Novels, with an introduction by the novelist Jonathan Lethem, published in 2006 by Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher. Homage to Blenholt concerns a well-meaning tenement schlemiel who hopes to escape poverty via various inventions and get-rich quick schemes. 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 crime noirCriss Cross. He also penned the psychodrama Panic in the Streets, which was directed by 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 singerRuth 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. 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. Fuchs died in Los Angeles.
Critique
wrote of Fuchs for Commentary Magazine in 1948 that "he showed such a rich gift for fictional portraiture of Jewish life in the American city that, given sustained work and growth of mind, he might have written its still-uncreated comedie humaine. After reading Fuchs' work one wonders: What was the source of his talent and the cause of his silence, and, perhaps more important, what was the relationship between his talent and his silence?" John Updike said, "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."
