Tess Slesinger was born in New York City in 1905. She attended Swarthmore and Columbia University. Her novel The Unpossessed was published in 1934 and a collection of her stories appeared the following year. Soon after its publication, she moved to Hollywood, where she became a successful screenwriter, earning an Oscar nomination for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which she co-wrote with her husband Frank Davis. She died of cancer in 1945.