Obituaries : Daniel Fuchs; Novelist and Oscar-Winning Film Writer

Daniel Fuchs, Academy Award-winning screenwriter and widely acclaimed novelist on Jewish life, has died in his Los Angeles home. He was 84.

Fuchs died of heart failure on July 26, his son, Thomas, said Monday.

The son of a New York newsstand owner, Fuchs earned the 1956 Oscar for best original story for scripting the MGM film “Love Me or Leave Me.”

Fuchs had come to Hollywood to write screenplays only because he saw himself as a failure--commercially at least--as a novelist.

Drawing on his Brooklyn upbringing to write about the Jewish immigrant ghetto, he began his career with a trilogy that many critics regard as his greatest work--”Summer in Williamsburg” first published in 1934, “Homage to Blenholt” in 1936 and “Low Company” in 1937.

Although critics praised the books, they sold poorly and Fuchs moved West to pen such screenplays as “The Hard Way” in 1942, “Hollow Triumph” in 1948 and “Interlude,” “Jeanne Eagels” and “Panic in the Streets,” all released in 1957.

His novel trilogy won new acclaim and success in 1961 when it was reprinted under the collective title “Three Novels” and again in 1972 when it was published as “The Williamsburg Trilogy.”

Rereading the novels in the 1960s after having discovered them in the 1930s, critic Hollis Alpert said: “I was fearful that they might not hold up, but time has neither dimmed nor darkened them, and I suspect they are more readable and compelling today, if only because the problems are different now, and we can meet all of the author’s wonderful people simply as people and not as representatives of a condition. They are fixed now, the nice ones, the evil ones, the old, the young, as a wonderful tapestry of ‘low life’ captured with unsentimental warmth.”

Encouraged by the modern reception to the trilogy, Fuchs wrote another novel, “West of the Rockies” in 1971, drawing on his Hollywood experience to fashion a tale about a film star and her agency representative.

Throughout his career, Fuchs contributed numerous short stories to such magazines as New Yorker, Esquire, Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post and New Republic, and many were reprinted in anthologies.

In one typical article he mused about his long absence from novel writing: “Aside from the obstinacy of readers and the fact there isn’t much money in my kind of writing, what restrained me was shame. . . . To tell the truth, I had the secret suspicion that the whole idea of fiction wasn’t upstanding, that it was basically tainted, foolish and fraudulent.”

In praising one of Fuchs’ anthologies in 1980, then-Times book critic Robert Kirsch noted that, although Fuchs’ career has often been cited as an example of the lack of support a gifted writer gets in America, assumptions that screenwriting had corrupted Fuchs were incorrect.

“He never does less than his best,” Kirsch wrote. “He had to contrive to make a living as a writer. He is realistic about screenwriting but he does not have contempt for it.”

Fuchs was educated at City College, now the City University of New York, and taught in the New York public elementary schools while beginning his writing career. He served in the Navy and the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

In addition to his son Thomas of Los Angeles, Fuchs is survived by another son, Jacob, of Berkeley, a sister, Helen Lieberman of Brooklyn, N.Y., and three grandchildren, David, Sarah and Anya. His wife of 60 years, Susan, died last December.