The Unpossessed

A Novel of the Thirties

By Tess Slesinger
Introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick

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.

Reviews

Unlike so many other thirties novels, The Unpossessed treats the "topical" themes of its age as subsets of a much larger, more abiding theme in literature: the folly of all human (and particularly of pompous intellectual) endeavor that aims at imposing a rational direction on something as incorrigibly messy as history. Slesinger’s note-perfect depiction of this folly gives The Unpossessed its irresistible narrative energy.
— The Atlantic Monthly

There is something curiously final, definitive, about this extraordinary first novel. Slashing, witty, vehement, both comic and heart-breaking, it makes the ordinary novel of contemporary New York seem pallid and synthetic. . .The Unpossessed has so much bite and drive that one can forgive minor faults.
— E. H. Walton, Forum

Tess Slesinger, was, I have no doubt, born to be a novelist. . .In any view of the American cultural situation the importance of the radical movement of the Thirties cannot be over-estimated. It may be said to have created the American intellectual as we know it. The political tendency of the Thirties defined the style of the class—from that radicalism came the moral urgency, the sense of crisis, the concern with personal salvation. The Unpossessed was the first novel to look at this new class in the interests of realism. . .with a happy acerbity of wit super-added.
— Lionel Trilling

It's sophisticated. . .full of cutting observations and over-eager images; satiric, then ecstatic, alternating social criticism with displays of sexual and intellectual coquetry.
— The Village Voice

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