Tess Slesinger (16 July 1905 – 21 February 1945) was a Jewish-American writer and screenwriter and is credited as being a charter 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 prominent psychoanalyst.
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.
Maxim Lieber served as her literary agent, 1933-1937 and in 1941.
Her one novel The Unpossessed (1934) is 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."
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.
She was the younger sister of Red Ryder creator Stephen Slesinger.
Tess Slesinger died of cancer at the age of 39.