Fox's mother wrote children's books, and the main character of her series was a little boy who hated his name. He'd tried to outsmart his family by running away, but a family of foxes had found him in the dead of winter, curled up under a tree in the forest. The foxes had become his best friends and surrogate family for many of the books until they located his parents and reunited the boy with his real family. The series had performed extremely well when Fox was a small child, even been nominated for a famed Caldecott award. That's why he'd chosen the name Fox.
As I read the details, I stumbled across an article that made me sympathize with the spot-stealer. Given the books' success, people assumed the story was about him. An overzealous mother who thought she needed to protect children h
