Theresa "Tess" Slesinger (July 16, 1905 – February 21, 1945) was an American writer and screenwriter and a member of the New York intellectual scene.

A modern edition describes it as "a cutting comedy about hard times, bad jobs, lousy marriages, little magazines, high principles, and the morning after" with "a cast of litterateurs, layabouts, lotharios, academic activists, and fur-clad patrons of protest and the arts."

Her name was among those included on the letter denouncing the Dewey Commission's investigation of the Moscow Trials, and she also endorsed the CP-initiated call for the Third American Writers' Congress in 1939.

However, like many other leftist intellectuals of the time, Slesinger grew disillusioned with the Soviet Union in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939.

[12] In James T. Farrell's novel Sam Holman (1983), there are thinly-veiled fictional portraits of many prominent New York intellectuals; the character of "Frances Dunsky" is reportedly based on Slesinger.