The greatest Jazz Age novel you've never heard of

When film scholar Marsha Gordon encountered the 1929 novel ‘Ex-Wife’ for the first time, she couldn’t believe she had never heard of the book or its author, Ursula Parrott. “Ex-Wife,” she writes, is a rich portrayal of New York City in the Jazz Age. It touches on topics – divorce, abortion, misogyny, substance abuse – that still resonate.

Upon its publication, “Ex-Wife” went through a dozen printings and initially sold over four times as many copies as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” which had been published four years prior.

As much as Gordon’s piece is about how Parrott’s personal struggles colored her most popular work, it’s also about the publishing industry: how books get marketed, how they get forgotten and how they get revived.

For much of the 20th century, the world of publishing and criticism was dominated by men – and this influenced which works became required reading for high schoolers and which were relegated to the dim, dusty stacks of university libraries.

“A parade of writers took up Gatsby’s cause” after Fitzgerald’s death, Gordon explains. They praised “it for precisely the same traits that might also have been found in ‘Ex-Wife,’ had anyone bothered to look: its use of contemporary language, its critique of hedonistic behavior, its rich attention to period detail and its depressing portrayal of aimless, unmoored characters trying and failing to find meaning in modern America.”

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