Margalit Fox Books in Order

Margalit Fox was born in Glen Cove, New York, and grew up on Long Island. Before journalism became her main work, music came first. She trained seriously as a cellist, studied at Barnard, then transferred to Stony Brook, where she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in linguistics. Later she took a master's degree in journalism at Columbia, bringing her ear for language into reporting.

Language was always part of the picture.

Fox spent the 1980s working in book and magazine publishing, which gave her a practical sense of how writing is made and edited. In 1994 she joined The New York Times as a summer replacement on the copy desk, and the job soon became permanent. She spent ten years at the Book Review, and also wrote on language, culture, and ideas for a range of publications. Books were always nearby, but she wanted work that asked for more reporting and more story.

That turn came through obituaries. Fox began writing advance obits, the carefully reported life stories newspapers prepare ahead of time, and found that the form suited her. In 2004 she moved into the obituary department full time. By the time she retired from the paper in 2018, she had written more than 1,400 obituaries, covering well-known figures like Maya Angelou and Maurice Sendak, along with quieter inventors and thinkers, including people behind the bar code, the Frisbee, and the crash-test dummy.

It was perfect training for books.

Her first book, Talking Hands, follows researchers studying a village sign language in the Bedouin community of Al-Sayyid in Israel, and uses that reporting to ask big questions about how human language begins. The Riddle of the Labyrinth turns the decipherment of Linear B into a human drama, with Arthur Evans, Michael Ventris, and especially Alice Kober at its center. Fox has a knack for making technical material feel open to general readers, without flattening the ideas or losing the suspense.

She later leaned harder into true crime and historical investigation. Conan Doyle for the Defense follows Arthur Conan Doyle as he takes apart the wrongful conviction of Oscar Slater. The Confidence Men tells the strange World War I story of Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, prisoners of war who used a fake Ouija board scheme to outwit their Ottoman captors. In The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, she moves to Gilded Age New York and the rise of Fredericka Mandelbaum, a peddler turned criminal boss. Readers often come to Fox for the reporting, but stay for the pacing and the sharp little human details.

Across all these books, certain interests keep showing up: language, codes, evidence, deception, and people who have been left at the edge of the standard version of history. Fox likes stories with puzzles in them, but not puzzles for their own sake. What matters to her is the human pressure inside them, obsession, bias, ambition, friendship, stubborn work, and the moment when a missing piece finally clicks into place.

Her journalism has brought outside recognition too. She won Front Page Awards from the Newswomen's Club of New York, and The Riddle of the Labyrinth received the William Saroyan Prize. After leaving the Times in 2018, she turned to books full time. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson. The thread that runs through her work is easy to spot: close observation, clean explanation, and a liking for stories that make the world feel stranger and more legible at the same time.