Background and career
Frances Ann Lebowitz (; born October 27, 1950) is an American writer, public speaker, cultural critic, and actor. She is known for her sardonic social commentary on American life, particularly from a New York City perspective, and for her association with prominent figures in the city's art and cultural scenes during the 1970s and 1980s. Lebowitz gained prominence with her books Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981), which are collected in The Fran Lebowitz Reader (1994). Lebowitz first became known as a writer in Manhattan's downtown art scene in the 1970s and later became an internationally sought-after public speaker and media personality. She has been the subject of two projects directed by Martin Scorsese: the HBO documentary film Public Speaking (2010) and the Netflix documentary series Pretend It's a City (2021).
Frances Ann Lebowitz was born on October 27, 1950 in Morristown, New Jersey, where she spent her childhood. She has a sister, Ellen, almost four years her junior. 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 15 and had a confirmation. She told Gyles Brandreth that she has been friends since childhood with Deborah A. Farrington (Harvard Business School 1976) and has smoked since she was 12. 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 and whose facilities have been purchased by The Craig School), a private girls' Episcopal school, in Mountain Lakes, where her grades marginally improved but 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 did not agree with Buckley. After being expelled from high school, Lebowitz earned a certificate of high school equivalency. When she was 18, her parents sent her to live with her aunt in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she stayed for six months.
In 1969, Lebowitz moved to New York City. Her father agreed to pay for her first two months in the city on the condition that she live at the women's-only Martha Washington Hotel. She then stayed with friends in New York apartments and Boston college dormitories, surviving by writing papers for students. At age 20, she rented a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village. To support herself during her early years in New York, Lebowitz held a variety of jobs, working as a cleaner, chauffeur, taxi driver, and pornography writer. She also worked in bulk mailing, sold belts on the street, cleaned apartments, and read poetry at a Greenwich Village nightclub. She later recalled that the club's performers included "a 75-year-old torch-singer and me." She considered herself a particularly good poetry reader and said the performances earned her a small following, which expanded when she read to an audience of about 2,000 young people at a nightclub in a Catskill Mountains hotel. Lebowitz refused to work as a waitress, claiming that sexual intercourse with a restaurant manager was often a prerequisite for being hired and that she "can't smile at people for money". At 21, she got a job selling advertising for Changes, a small magazine devoted to what she called "radical-chic politics and culture" founded by Susan Graham Ungaro, the jazz musician Charles Mingus's wife. While working at the magazine, Lebowitz began writing satirical essays in her spare time. She initially wrote book reviews before taking over the publication's film reviews when the regular film critic took a leave of absence.
Lebowitz has said the film reviews attracted a larger readership, prompting her to seek a similar position at Andy Warhol's Interview magazine in 1972. Through a friend who wrote for Interview, Lebowitz arranged an appointment with editor Glenn O'Brien. She told O'Brien that she wanted to write humorous reviews of bad films and requested her own, unedited page at the back of the magazine. O'Brien agreed, and she was paid $10 per review. Her film criticism evolved into the column The Best of the Worst, which focused on poorly received films. She later wrote the column I Cover the Waterfront. Lebowitz never formed a close friendship with Warhol, unlike some of his other associates at the Factory, and was often quiet in his presence. According to former Interview editor Bob Colacello, Lebowitz told him that she had deliberately avoided becoming too close to Warhol before establishing herself as a writer, fearing that "my sense of humor would somehow become Andy Warhol's sense of humor." While writing for Interview, Lebowitz also briefly worked for Mademoiselle magazine. She gained recognition for her sardonic social commentary on American life, shaped by her New York City perspective. British Vogue called her "the natural successor to Dorothy Parker" and there were clubs dedicated to her at Yale University, the University of Michigan, and New York University. During this period, Lebowitz became friends with numerous artists and writers, including photographers Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe, who frequently gave her photographs, many of which she discarded in the 1970s. Through her association with figures in the city's art and cultural scene, she became linked to many prominent personalities of the 1970s and 1980s, including Martin Scorsese, Jerome Robbins, David Wojnarowicz, Candy Darling, and the New York Dolls.
In 1978, Lebowitz's first book, Metropolitan Life, was published by E. P. Dutton and became a New York Times bestseller. The book collected comedic essays, most of which had previously appeared in Mademoiselle and Interview, with titles including "Success Without College" and "A Few Words on a Few Words." Many of the essays focused on subjects she found irritating or absurd, which she treated with dry, sardonic humor. After the book was published, she became a local celebrity, frequenting Studio 54 and making regular appearances on television talk shows. Lebowitz's second book, Social Studies, was published in 1981 and also became a New York Times bestseller. Like its predecessor, it collected mostly previously published essays from Mademoiselle and Interview, addressing subjects including teenagers, films, and room service. In 1994, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies were collected in a single volume, The Fran Lebowitz Reader.
Since the mid-1990s, Lebowitz has been known for her decades-long writer's block. Her last published book was Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas (1994), a children's book about giant pandas living in New York City who long to move to Paris. Since that time, Lebowitz has worked on various book projects that have not been completed. This includes Exterior Signs of Wealth, an unfinished novel purportedly about rich people who want to be artists and artists who want to be rich. Another book, Progress, was excerpted in Vanity Fair in 2004, but has yet to be completed. When discussing her writer's block, she said: "My editor—who, whenever I introduce him as my editor, always says, 'easiest job in town'—he says that the paralysis I have about writing is caused by an excessive reverence for the written word, and I think that's probably true."
