Every now and then, we hear about people with such extraordinary spirits who defy the odds in such remarkable ways that their life stories can renew our faith in life itself. Such people occasionally become the subjects of feature films, such as Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French editor of Elle magazine who suffered from locked-in syndrome and whose story of learning how to write through blinking was dramatized in the 2007 film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Or Christy Brown, the quadriplegic Irish artist and author who learned how to use his left foot to paint and write and whose life story was portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis in the Oscar-winning 1989 movie My Left Foot. Such cinematic immortalization may be in the offing for Paul Alexander, the polio survivor and author who managed to live a full life despite spending the vast majority of his existence inside an iron lung.

Alexander was born in Dallas on Jan. 30, 1946. One day, after having played outdoors for a bit too long in the smoldering Texas heat, he came back home with a fever so severe that his parents immediately took him to the hospital. After several rounds of testing, their worst fears were confirmed: Their 6-year-old son had polio.