While his best-known work was as a photographer and filmmaker, Parks was an accomplished writer of memoirs, poetry, and novels, publishing twenty books in his lifetime; writing was in fact his most personal and intimate form of expression throughout his life. As a staff photographer for Life, Parks was periodically asked to contribute articles, many of which accompanied his photo essays—an unusual role for any photographer.

Some of Parks’s earliest published works include two books on photography techniques. In 1963 he published The Learning Tree, a semiautobiographical account of a Black boy growing up in segregated Kansas. The book was later adapted into a Hollywood feature film six years later, which Parks wrote, directed, and scored. The Learning Tree was followed by the autobiography A Choice of Weapons (1966) and then by A Poet and His Camera (1968), a collection of poetry with color photographs. In 1971, Parks published Born Black, which featured nine essays he wrote for Life accompanied by a selection of photographs. Following several published memoirs and autobiographies, Parks published Glimpses Towards Infinity and Arias In Silence, which showcased his later abstract photographic work alongside his writing.

Parks continued to author works throughout his life, spending several of his last years researching the life of the English Romanticist painter Joseph Mallord William Turner on whom his final novel, The Sun Stalker, a work of historical fiction, is based.