Fran Lebowitz is an American writer, essayist, satirist, and public speaker famous for her humorously sneering takes on New York City and American life and her self-assured, witty personality. Lebowitz was born into a Jewish family in 1950 in Morristown, New Jersey, where her parents owned a furniture shop, and where, as she would later recount, the only expectation for her future was that she would be a good wife. However, rather than succumbing to this constrictive environment, Lebowitz rebelled from an early age, declaring herself atheist by the age of seven, being suspended from school (and eventually expelled from her high school, graduating with a GED), and engaging in stunts like dressing up as Fidel Castro for a fancy dress party. In 1969, she moved to NYC, and worked a variety of jobs—taxi driver and cleaner, among others— before beginning to write book reviews for the Changes magazine. She would eventually become acquainted with Andy Warhol, and got a job at his Interview magazine after pressuring editor Glenn O’Brien to give her an unedited column for reviews of bad movies. Prominent figures of the downtown NYC art scene like Robert Mapplethorpe and members of the New York Dolls band were among her readers as she found herself increasingly immersed in this scene, where her personality—that of a gay, rebellious, abrasive young writer— found the acceptance it had lacked in the conservative community of her upbringing, though she would also form friendships with jazz musicians like Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. From her writing emerged two books of critical essays about New York and good manners, Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981), and she moved to the Mademoiselle magazine. She would transition from her career as a writer to a public figure, becoming a regular guest on David Letterman’s Late Night, with a forcefully cynical personality that matched her writing and a distinctive style (Blue Levis and tailored suits from Anderson & Sheppard, a London Tailor that fits customers like Prince Charles) that made her a heavily intriguing character, keeping her in the public eye as she suffered what she called a prolonged “writer’s blockade.” This difficulty was not alleviated by the fact that Lebowitz is a self-proclaimed master of not working, stating, for example, that she was working on her proposed novel Exterior Signs of Wealth on the side as “Full-time I’m watching daytime TV.” Nonetheless, she remained prominent in artistic circles, counting Toni Morrison and Martin Scorsese, among others, as close friends. Through the documentary Public Speaking (2010) and the mini-series Pretend it’s a City (2021), both directed by Scorsese, Lebowitz has been reintroduced, this time to a new generation, and has seen a sort of resurgence in popularity in the past decade, where she has become a symbol of an increasingly glamourized era in New York. Lebowitz and her critical writing, her cynical humor, and her outsized personality are worth remembering, though not as a fossil but as a living, breathing, sneering part of this city’s cultural history, its ever-present critic and lover. Sources: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1931/a-humorist-at-work-fran-lebowitz and https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/feb/07/fran-lebowitz-pretend-its-a-city-martin-scorsese-netflix