Anne Parrish - Career

Career

As a young woman, Parrish trained at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and studied under Thomas Eakins. She chose a career in literature, with her first romantic novel Pocketful of Poses appearing in 1923, the same year she had a children's book published, with her brother Dillwyn doing the illustrations. Their collaboration titled Knee-High to a Grasshopper was followed by another book for children in 1924, Lustres.

The following year she won a Newbery Honor for The Dream Coach, the third collaboration with her brother. That same year, her novel The Perennial Bachelor was the eighth best-selling book for the entire year according to the New York Times and won the Harper Prize from her publisher. An author of stories that mostly featured female protagonists, in 1927, she had another novel make it into the top ten list of bestselling novels in the United States. She repeated on the annual bestsellers list again in 1928 with All Kneeling, that was made into the 1950 film Born to Be Bad, starring Joan Fontaine and Robert Ryan.

Parish assembled an art collection that included the 1873 Impressionist painting Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil by Pierre-Auguste Renoir which she bequeathed to the Wadsworth Atheneum museum of art in Hartford, Connecticut.

Parrish died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Danbury, Connecticut in 1957. She endowed the "Anne Parrish Titzell Professor of Neurology" chair at Cornell University, originally for research and treatment of mental and emotional disorders.