Ursula Parrott (March 26, 1899[1] – September 1957), was a prolific modern novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer whose sensational first novel, Ex-Wife (1929), was a Jazz Age best seller.

[2] During her lifetime, her works fell into obscurity, only to be revived when Ex-Wife was republished in 1988 and 2023 (paperback), garnering considerable attention in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Paris Review and other prestigious publications.

Amy Helmes and Kim Askew of the “Lost Ladies of Lit Podcast” linked the book favorably to Mary McCarthy’s “The Group,” Rona Jaffe’s “The Best of Everything” and even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterworks “The Great Gatsby” and Tender Is The Night.

[1] After graduating in 1920 with a degree in English,[4] she moved to Greenwich Village, where, the same year, she met Lindesay Marc Parrott.

Still, she made an astonishing amount of money, churning out advertising copy, short stories, novels and screenplays.

[6] In December 1942, Parrott made headlines when she was brought up on federal charges of attempting to help jazz guitarist Michael Neely Bryan escape from the Miami Beach Army stockade.

"Although she’d published twenty-two books and over fifty stories, the New York Times still reminded its audience of her identity by saying she was the author of Ex-Wife," noted Paris Review critic Michael LePointe in 2019.

[15] He had written a rueful, affectionate afterword to the republication of Ex-Wife, which astonished him, since it had been so long forgotten, vividly describing his mother's workaholic lifestyle.

[12] The New York Mirror’s serialization of the “book everybody is talking about” coincided with the stock market crash and the start of the Great Depression.

"Her biography salvages and reconstructs Parrott’s many remains, rescuing an important American voice and cultural figure from near oblivion," wrote Alan Sobsey in the Los Angeles Review of Books, in 2023.