Fran Lebowitz

Fran Lebowitz is an American author, public speaker, and occasional actor. Born on October 27, 1950, in Morristown, New Jersey, she is known for her sardonic social commentary on American life, particularly through her New York City sensibilities. Lebowitz has been associated with prominent figures of the 1970s and 1980s New York art scene, including Andy Warhol, Martin Scorsese, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Her books Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981) gained her fame, and they were later combined into The Fran Lebowitz Reader in 1994. Lebowitz 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).