[4] Adam Parry studied under Ivan Mortimer Linforth and Harold F. Cherniss at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1949.

[7] He moved to Harvard University to embark on a Ph.D. programme the following year,[8] now supporting himself by working as a taxi driver in Boston and periodically attending classes in his uniform.

[8] Later in 1952, while still writing up his doctoral thesis[10] (titled "Logos" and "Ergon" in Thucydides[11][b] and supervised by Eric Havelock[13]), Parry took a post as an instructor in classics at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

[13] Along with his then-wife Barbara, he translated in 1954 from French Personal Religion Among the Greeks, a publication of the Sather Classical Lectures delivered at Berkeley in 1952–1953 by André-Jean Festugière.

[15] He later completed another translation, this time from modern Greek, of a chapter on the Old East Slavic epic poem known as The Tale of Igor's Campaign.

[28] In 1975, Havelock wrote that it remained a widely cited work on its topic, and noted that Kirk had selected it for his 1964 edited collection, The Language and Background of Homer.

[35] This essay is regarded as a foundational text of the Harvard School's mode of reading the Aeneid as a poem which challenges Augustan ideology.

[36] Other prominent Harvard School writers included W. Ralph Johnson, Wendell Clausen, Michael Putnam, Oliver Lyne and Robert Angus Brooks.

[40] In 2006, Brian Breed cited it as a text of "great influence", particularly on Oliver Lyne's 1987 Further Voices in Virgil's "Aeneid";[36] a 2017 retrospective on the Harvard School by Julia Hejduk called it "seminal".

[31] In 2018, Susanna Braund wrote that "if there is one single scholarly intervention that shifted our view of the Aeneid, it was surely Adam Parry's essay".

[41] In 2017, Ward Brooks referred to the dominant paradigm of Virgilian studies in the generations after Parry's article as "a kind of Parryitis".

Lurie's characters are the parents of children who burn down two college houses, and Lloyd-Jones wrote of being told that this detail had been based on the Parries.

[48] Parry married Anne Reinberg Amory, a visiting lecturer at Yale and previously his contemporary as a Ph.D. student at Harvard,[49] in April 1966.

"[53] Lloyd-Jones wrote that Parry had once told him that he had only ever imagined being a classical scholar, a lawyer or a beachcomber, and that he would never have become the former had he not outlived his father.