Empowered Women Ran in Her Family and Her Heroines: The Screenwriting Career of Tess Slesinger

Though Tess Slesinger wrote only 12 films her contribution to classic Hollywood screenwriting and adaptation deserves focus.  Born on July 16, 1905 to Jewish parents of Hungarian-Russian heritage, Slesinger grew up with three older brothers on New York’s Upper West Side.  Her father worked in the garment world and her mother, Augusta Slesinger went from being a welfare worker to becoming a psychoanalyst and helping found the New School for Social Research. Slesinger learned talents from both of her parents’ professions to fuel her career writing short stories and eventually screenplays.

In 1925 she received a B.A. in English from the School of Journalism at Columbia where Slesinger also met her first husband, Herbert Solow. Influenced by the actions of suffragist Lucy Stone, when she married him in 1928, Slesinger did not change her name.  After working as a journalist for a few years, she also began writing book reviews for a magazine started by Solow and a professor they both knew at Columbia. In 1932 she added short story writer to her repertoire by publishing “Missis Flinders” - a piece about a married woman obtaining an abortion.  Two years later she expanded the story into her first novel, The Unpossessed.

By then Slesinger had divorced Solow, married Frank Davis, and sold a slew of other short stories for popular magazines such as Vanity Fair and New Yorker which were then published as Time: The Present (1935).  MGM producer Irving Thalberg offered Slesinger a thousand dollars a week to adapt The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck into a film, a credit she shared with Talbot Jennings and Claudine West. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Good Earth for an Oscar as Best Film of 1938 and Luise Rainer won the Oscar for Best Actress.  Not a bad beginning to a promising screenwriting career.

Immediately, Slesinger began supporting the Screen Writer’s Guild, the predecessor of today’s Writers Guild of America while also earning more script assignments.  She co-wrote The Bride Wore Red (1937) for Dorothy Arzner to direct and Joan Crawford to star. The original story Girls School followed in 1938, then she did some rewrites on the adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1940) with Jane Murfin. 

Slesinger had met her second husband, assistant producer Frank Davis on the set of Good Earth and married him in Mexico in 1936. Together they had two children and co-wrote a few films, but didn’t always function as a team. They wrote the feminist musical comedy Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) also for Arzner to direct and Are Husbands Necessary? (1942).  Their final collaboration came in adapting A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), based on the original novel by Betty Smith.  Slesinger deeply understood the life of a young, first-generation daughter of Irish immigrants living in New York City before the Great War changed all their lives. 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn earned them an Oscar nomination for Best Writing, Screenplay. Sadly, Slesinger died of cancer in February of 1945 and was unable to see either the film premiere to great success or to learn of the Oscar laurels. But the empowered, young female characters she created continue to inspire generation after generation through their own conflicts, allowing them to achieve as Tess did. Though it was her son, Peter Davis, who followed her into the family business by becoming a producer and novelist.

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