[3] With her stage career struggling—Delmar deemed herself "not a good actress"—she took on various employments in the 1920s, including theater usher, typist, switchboard operator, and assistant manager of a moving picture house in Harlem.

Zimmerman, apparently, formally changed his name to Eugene Delmar in July 1929,[citation needed] though conclusive evidence of this action is lacking.

The Delmars gained a brief moment of national attention in June 1921 when Viña, on a gag, placed an advertisement to "rent" her husband for a year.

[7] Delmar's breakthrough as a writer occurred at age 25 with Bad Girl, a popular fiction novel published in 1928 by Harcourt Brace and Co.

Spinning a cautionary tale about premarital sex, pregnancy, and childbirth, filtered through the lens of the tenement, working-class married life, Bad Girl was an unexpected and immediate sensation.

Kept Woman was a novel, while Loose Ladies presented eleven fictional portraits of modern American city women.

[citation needed] As the Great Depression took hold in the early 1930s, Delmar's gritty tenement stories began to slip out of favor with the reading public.

Women Live Too Long and The Marriage Racket was published in 1932 and 1933, respectively, but neither book nor the quick follow-ups to Bad Girl managed to crack the bestseller lists, though all were later reissued in paperback by Avon in the 1940s.

With the exception of "The End of the World," a short story that initially appeared in Cosmopolitan, and which was reformatted and sold in paperback in 1934, Delmar didn't have a new book published until 1950.

There, the Delmars nourished a connection to film director Leo McCarey, which led to contracts for two screenplays, both of which were developed into McCarey-directed movies.

"[12] During the 1930s and 40s, Delmar and her husband continued to churn out short stories, most of which were regularly featured in large-circulation magazines, such as Cosmopolitan and Liberty.

By the mid-1940s, the duo had switched gears to the theater, writing the drama The Rich Full Life: A Play in Three Acts, which opened November 9, 1945, in New York City.

However, the play failed to find an audience and closed after 27 performances[14] (it was however filmed as an Elizabeth Taylor vehicle entitled Cynthia (1947)).

Detailing the life and love of a small-time Beverly Hills boarding house owner and the lives of her tenants, the novel's movie rights were purchased prior to its publication with its 1954 filmation proving a considerable success.

As with New Orleans Lady, Beloved was set in the 19th century American South but was focused on actual historical personages, chiefly Judah Benjamin.

Growing up in New York as the daughter of theater actors and performers, Delmar was aware of class conflict and social issues.

In her article for the Belles Lettres publication, a women’s literary journal, Carolyn Banks writes, “Her mother had pretensions and never quite accepted her father's ties to old neighbourhood friends, many of whom were involved in shady activities.

Viña, an only child, was witness to their many steely battles about this and doubtless internalized the conflict.”[19] Class conflicts manifested themselves in Delmar’s work later on, as many of her characters were working-class and her writing often portrayed tenement life.

[19] Delmar’s characters were working-class women who cursed, had premarital sex, thought independently, and faced modern issues.

Delmar dropped out of school as a teenager and described herself as poorly educated, but during the 1920s and 1930s, she was considered one of the best writers of the time with a unique and powerful understanding of the human condition.

At the age of twenty-three, Viña Delmar was thrust into the public spotlight due to the tremendous, unexpected success of her first novel, Bad Girl.

When several of her short stories and novels were later adapted to film, Delmar's name and face were often featured prominently on promotional posters and in newspaper advertising.

Viña claimed she met her husband at a Greenwich Village rendezvous, that it was a case of "love at first sight," and they married the next day.

Note: Official documents and published material reveal that Viña Delmar and her husband, Gene, were not always forthright when it came to providing personal information.