She got her break with a poem, “Any Porch,” which she sent to Frank Crowninshield, the editor at Vanity Fair. She was first hired as the caption writer at Vogue, but she became a staff writer for Vanity Fair, and eventually became the drama critic for Vanity Fair. However, she lost her job in 1920 because she made a wisecrack about the actress Billie Burke (the wife of one of the magazine’s advertisers).

This did not stop her from finding success though, as she published around 300 poems in the 1920s, and one of her volumes of poetry became a bestseller in 1926. She was also publishing short stories in The New Yorker, the magazine she helped to shape from its inception in 1925. Additionally, she became part of an informal literary luncheon club at the Algonquin Hotel that was eventually known as The Round Table. She married her first husband, Edwin Pond Parker II, in 1917. He was a Wall Street stockbroker, alcoholic, and morphine addict, and they divorced in 1928 (he later died of a drug overdose). She too self-medicated, but she would joke that she was a drinker with a writing problem. She did not have control of her finances, and twice, she attempted suicide.

She Was Blacklisted

Alan Campbell, her second husband, was 11 years younger and bisexual. They too divorced, though they would later remarry. She and Campbell moved to Hollywood, where they co-wrote the screenplay for A Star is Born (1937) with Robert Carson. Like her first husband, Campbell would die of an overdose. She fought for social justice, and also fought fascism; her activities led to her being suspected of being a communist. After the accusation and being blacklisted, she returned to New York and wrote book reviews for Esquire.

As for her reception, feminists did not readily embrace Parker, and she was accused of attacking women, not having a feminist view of the world, and writing for a male audience. The female characters in her short stories typically tried to rectify the differences between new choices ahead of them and social constraints. She also used her short stories to confront questions of economic inequalities, race, family, and war. She was very dismissive of her own talents, and with age, she began to disown the quotes that were attributed to her. During the last years of her life, she lived alone with her dog in a hotel room on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Her Ashes Took A Long Journey

On June 7, 1967, she died of a heart attack, and left the bulk of her estate to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., although she had never met him. Less than a year after her death, King was assassinated, but Parker stipulated that her estate would go to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was cremated, and her ashes were unclaimed. Six years passed, and they were sent to her lawyer, stored in Paul O’Dwyer, his former colleague’s, office for years. After O’Dwyer revealed that he had the ashes, the NAACP claimed them. They were then interred in a memorial garden at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1988. The NAACP moved from its headquarters in 2020, and Parker’s living relatives requested her remains be returned to New York. They were buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx on her birthday, and in August 2021, a headstone was placed to mark the spot where her remains were buried. While she may have created controversy in her lifetime, she continues to live on in her words, from her suggested epitaph, “if you can read this, you’re standing too close” to the oft-repeated “men never make passes at girls who wear glasses,” to clever twists, like, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”