Tess Slesinger
| Tess Slesinger | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
July 16, 1905 New York City |
| Died | 21 February 1945 (aged 39) Los Angeles |
| Occupation | Writer, Screenwriter |
| Nationality | American |
Tess Slesinger (16 July 1905 – 21 February 1945) was an American writer and screenwriter and a member of the New York intellectual scene.
She was born as Theresa Slesinger in New York, as the fourth child of Anthony Slesinger, a Hungarian-born dress manufacturer, and Augusta (Singer) Slesinger, a welfare worker who later (after 1931) became a prominent psychoanalyst. Her family was Jewish. She was the younger sister of three brothers, including Stephen Slesinger, later the creator of Red Ryder. She was educated at Ethical Culture Fieldston School from September 1912 until June 1922, Swarthmore College and the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York.
In December 1932, Story Magazine published her short story "Missis Flinders," which was based on Slesinger's own experience of having an abortion, and may have been the first short story to appear in a large-circulation periodical to address that theme explicitly. Encouraged to expand the story, Slesinger incorporated it as the final chapter of her only novel, The Unpossessed (1934). The novel is also a satire of the New York left-wing milieu in which she then lived. A recent edition describes it as "a cutting comedy about hard times, bad jobs, lousy marriages, little magazines, high principles, and the morning after" with "a cast of litterateurs, layabouts, lotharios, academic activists, and fur-clad patrons of protest and the arts." She helped to establish the Screen Writers Guild in 1933.
Her first husband was Herbert Solow, editor of the Menorah Journal. After marrying her second husband, screenwriter Frank Davis, she moved to California in 1935. Slesinger was responsible for the screenplays, among others, of The Good Earth (1937) and, at the end of her life, she adapted A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1946) with Davis, which won them an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.
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