The twins graduated summa cum laude from college and went on to receive master's degrees in American literature from Yale University by the age of 17.
[2] Parish was drawn there by Latin American scholar Eugene Bolton, who accepted both Helen and Olive into his seminar on 16th-Century Spanish colonial history.
[1] Parish worked as a free-lance writer, ghost-writing a number of books for Viking Press, as well as pursuing her scholarly interests at Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.
Parish eventually became a research associate there, where she assembled the world's largest collection of rare Las Casas books and documents.
"[1] At Cesar Chavez Park in Berkeley, California, a memorial plaque for Parish sits attached to a large rock.