Frances Ann Lebowitz is an American author, public speaker, and occasional actor, who has been critical of the gentrification and changing the culture of New York City. She has been called the “opposite of lean-in feminism”.  Lebowitz is also known for her books like Metropolitan life(1978) and Social studies(1981), which were combined into The Fran Lebowitz Reader in 1994. 

She has also been the subject of two projects directed by Martin Scorsese, the HBO documentary film Public Speaking (2010) and the Netflix document series Pretend It’s a City (2021). Fran was called a modern-day Dorothy Parker by the New York Times.

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She developed a love of reading from an early age, to such a point that she would surreptitiously read during class and neglect the homework. Lebowitz was overall a poor student and didn’t like to study and was expelled and suspended from different high schools.

After being expelled from high school, she earned her GED and moved to moved New York, where she survived by writing papers for students. At the age of 20, she worked as a cleaning lady, chauffeur, taxi driver, and pornography writer.

Then she worked for Changes, a small magazine “about radical-chic politics and culture”. Lebowitz sold advertising space and then wrote book and movie reviews. Later she was hired as a columnist for Interview, where she wrote a column called “I Cover the Waterfront”. 

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Her book, Metropolitan life was published in 1978, the book was a set of comedic essays mostly from Mademoiselle and Interview. Since the 1990s, she has been known for her decades-long writer’s block, her last published book was Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas(1994).

Since then, Lebowitz has worked on several book projects but they have not been completed. Although, her book progress was first excerpted in Vanity Fair in 2004, but it has yet to be completed as of 2021.