Tess Slesinger’s writing invites comparison with the best work of Dorothy Parker, Dawn Powell and Mary McCarthy. She will be remembered for her modern & up-to-the-minute report on the state of marriage, sexuality, political culture, and work in 1930s America. Her style was biting, yet emotionally revealing, typical of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker where she published frequently. Slesinger moved in the same circles as Lionel Trilling, Clifton Fadiman and other famed liberal intellectuals, who seem to have provided her with rich material. Tess Slesinger’s cult classic 1934 novel, The Unpossessed details the ins and outs & 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.

“It’s sophisticated … satiric, then ecstatic, alternating social criticism with displays of sexual and intellectual coquetry.”
— The Village Voice

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Blue cloth over boards with red/gold titles. Red top stain. Dust jacket with tipped in author photo, as issued. Wear and minor sunning to edges of boards. Some soiling to page edges, and foxing to end pages. Dust jacket shows some tanning, with one small red stain to rear. Interior pages clean and binding tight.  Scarce!

Bookseller Inventory # 23013

SOLD

The Unpossessed
Slesinger, Tess

Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: 1934
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Sold ·