The Unpossessed

by Tess Slesinger, Elizabeth Hardwick (Introduction)

Overview

Tess Slesinger’s 1934 novel, The Unpossessed details the ins and outs and ups and downs of left-wing New York intellectual life and features a cast of litterateurs, layabouts, lotharios, academic activists, and fur-clad patrons of protest and the arts. This cutting comedy about hard times, bad jobs, lousy marriages, little magazines, high principles, and the morning after bears comparison with the best work of Dawn Powell and Mary McCarthy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590175453
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	05/23/2012
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	328
File size:	626 KB

About the Author

Tess Slesinger (1905-1945) grew up in New York in a progressive assimilated Jewish family and attended Swarthmore College and the Columbia University School of Journalism. After a few short-term jobs in journalism, she married Herbert Solow, editor of the Menorah Journal, through whom she became acquainted with the leading young, leftist intellectuals of the time, including Lionel Trilling and Clifton Fadiman. In addition to The Unpossessed, her only published novel, Slesinger’s writing credits include one book of short stories, Time: the Present, and several screenplays, including The Good Earth and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor of The New York Review of Books and contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine. NYRB Classics publishes Sleepless Nights, a novel, and Seduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature.

Editorial Reviews

It's sophisticated...satiric, then ecstatic, alternating social criticism with displays of sexual and intellectual coquetry.

Village Voice

The farce or is it the tragedy? of New York leftist intellectuals done in by free love is gleefully taken up in The Unpossessed, the newly reissued 1934 comic novel by Tess Slesinger (1905-1945). Among the union organizers, academics, activists and slumming society folk who make up the cast are transplanted New Englander Miles ("his... conscience ticking neatly on his desk, beside the clock"); philanderer and mediocre novelist Jeffrey Blake, who gets it on with Comrade Fisher, a militant Trotskyite; and the droning Marxist professor Bruno Leonard. Several of these characters are, of course, planning to start a magazine. Slesinger, a New York native, moved in the same circles as Lionel Trilling, Clifton Fadiman and other famed liberal intellectuals, who seem to have provided her with rich material. Introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick. (Sept. 26) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly