Fran Lebowitz

Frances Ann Lebowitz is a public speaker and occasional actor. She is known for her sardonic social commentary on American life as filtered through her New York City sensibilities and her association with many prominent figures of the 1970s and 1980s New York art scene, including Andy Warhol, Martin Scorsese, Jerome Robbins, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz and the New York Dolls.

The New York Times has called her a modern-day Dorothy Parker. Lebowitz gained fame for her books Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981), which were combined into The Fran Lebowitz Reader in 1994. She has been the subject of two projects directed by Martin Scorsese, the HBO documentary film Public Speaking (2010) and the Netflix docu-series Pretend It's a City (2021).

Lebowitz was born and raised in Morristown, New Jersey. She had one sister, Ellen. Her parents were Ruth and Harold Lebowitz, who owned Pearl's Upholstered Furniture, a furniture store and upholstery workshop. She developed a love of reading from an early age, to the point that she would surreptitiously read during class and neglect her homework. Lebowitz describes her "Jewish identity [as] ethnic or cultural or whatever people call it now. 

But it's not religious." She has been an atheist since age 7. She did not have a bat mitzvah but did go to Sunday school until she was 15 and had a confirmation. Lebowitz was a poor student overall, particularly in algebra, which she failed six times. She has called it "the first thing which they presented to me that I absolutely could not understand at all and had no interest in understanding."

She worked at a Carvel ice cream store. Her grades were so poor that her parents enrolled her in The Wilson School (now defunct), a private girls' Episcopal school in Mountain Lakes, where her grades marginally improved. Still, she had difficulty following the rules and was eventually expelled for "nonspecific surliness." She also was suspended from Morristown High School for sneaking out of pep rallies.

As an adolescent, Lebowitz was deeply affected by James Baldwin: "James Baldwin was the first person I ever saw on television who I heard talk like that—by which I mean, he was the first intellectual I ever heard talk... And I was just flabbergasted. That made me read him." She also enjoyed watching television appearances by Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, though she disagreed with Buckley.