The Racy Jazz Age Best Seller You’ve Never Heard Of
Ursula Parrott was accused of promoting a dangerous sexual freedom. In her best-selling novels, the controversial author chronicled “life in the era of the one-night stand” during the twenties and thirties. Parrott’s extraordinary life took her to the heights of literary New York and pre-Code Hollywood, then left her jailed, penniless, and alone. Today, her books are out of print, and her name is all but forgotten.
I stumbled across her name in an advertisement at the back of a copy of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy from the early nineties. One of Parrott’s novels was sandwiched between works by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Toni Morrison in a series of classics by “American Women Writers.” Eminent company, to be sure, but that was the last time one of her books was reissued—thirty years ago. Pursuing Parrott through the scant archives, I discovered an author whose work and life were exemplary of her time, yet strangely stranded there.
When Parrott’s Ex-Wife was published, anonymously, in 1929, it was an immediate sensation. It went on to sell over a hundred thousand copies in nine editions. The publisher billed it as a “sociological document,” suggesting that the twenty-eight-year-old narrator, Patricia, would provide readers with a glimpse into the rapidly changing sexual mores of the time. The fact that the novel was published anonymously gave it the aura of confession.
Ninety years later, still carries the ring of truth. The premise of this beguiling, if imperfect, book is simple. Like any good modern married couple, Patricia and Peter have both committed adultery. Although she’s unnerved by his transgression, she does her best to take it in stride—by committing her own..”
