Fran Lebowitz

Renowned by generations as a quintessential New Yorker, Fran Lebowitz arrived in New York City in her late teens after being expelled from her New Jersey preparatory school for what she has described, in her trademark acerbic humor, as “nonspecific surliness.” From a young age she had aspired to be a writer, and within a few years of moving to New York she began publishing her work in magazines such as Interview and Mademoiselle. Her writing, punctuated with a rapier-like wit and perfectly parsed epigrams lampooning modern life, soon drew comparisons to that of Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker. A decades-long bout of writer’s block slowed her output beginning in the 1980s, but her reputation as a curmudgeonly—and consistently funny—cultural critic grew through her frequent public lectures and memorable talk show appearances.

New Jersey childhood

Lebowitz’s father, Harold Lebowitz, owned a furniture store in Morristown, New Jersey. Her mother, Ruth Lebowitz, was a homemaker and a former jitterbug dance champion. By her own account, Lebowitz had a happy, secure childhood. Briefly, she dreamed of becoming a toll collector (because she assumed toll collectors kept the money people paid them at toll booths) or a cellist, though she had no musical talent. Her ambitions changed, however, when she made an important discovery about books, which she loved. As she told The New York Times in 1994, “Until I was about 7, I thought books were just there, like trees. When I learned that people actually wrote them, I wanted to, too, because all children aspire to inhuman feats like flying.”

Indeed, Lebowitz wrote her first book when she was about eight, a mystery called The Secret Castle that was inspired by the Nancy Drew books and that Lebowitz wrote out by hand in pencil in a loose-leaf notebook. Having heard of a book by a wealthy child published in the 19th century, Lebowitz fully expected that she would be able to publish The Secret Castle. But, as she explained to High Times magazine in 1978, “I didn’t connect with the fact that [the other child’s] father was a lord and that he had it privately printed, and that my father was not a lord—he owned a furniture store and had no intention of having a book privately printed.”

Despite her love of reading, Lebowitz was a disinterested student. She had a rebellious streak that she expressed through making jokes, being overly talkative, and surreptitiously reading James Thurber’s books hidden behind her textbooks in class. Lebowitz’s mother often warned her against being funny, telling her that boys do not like funny girls. However, Lebowitz, who knew from a young age that she is a lesbian, paid no attention to this advice. As she told The Guardian in 2022, “Well, first of all, that [advice] turned out not to be true and, second of all, I turned out not to care.” Though Lebowitz was raised as a Conservative Jew, her parents enrolled her in an Episcopalian school. She also attended a Sunday school, where she made her Christian confirmation despite being a confirmed atheist.

Struggling New York artist

In her senior year of prep school Lebowitz was expelled for no reason, she has explained, other than that she “just wasn’t the headmaster’s cup of tea.” She took a high-school equivalency test to receive her diploma and in 1970 moved to New York City because, to her, it was “the most exciting place in the world.”

Lebowitz settled in Manhattan, where she worked at odd jobs such as driving a taxi and selling belts on the street. During her first couple of years in the city, she struggled as an artist, reciting her poems at open mics, sometimes to audiences that consisted solely of the venue’s cleaning staff, and writing pornography as a subcontractor for other writers. For a fee of $500 (“the most money I’d ever made”), she published a pornographic book called House of Leather “under the name of the headmaster who threw me out of school.”

Career at Interview and Mademoiselle

Lebowitz’s break came when she got a job selling advertising space in Changes, a small culture publication, and soon began contributing reviews. In the early 1970s she started as a columnist at Interview, a magazine published by famed Pop artist Andy Warhol. Initially, Lebowitz wrote an uproariously funny film column called “The Best of the Worst,” in which she reviewed B-movies. (“Truckstop Women was one of my favorites,” she recalled to High Times. “The title song was sung by a truck.”) Eventually, she began another column at Interview called “I Cover the Waterfront,” then moved on to Mademoiselle, where she had a column called “The Fran Lebowitz Report.” Her columns, which focused on culture and society, were highly regarded for Lebowitz’s witty, if cranky, musings on modern life.

Get Unlimited Access

Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more.

Subscribe

The wit and wisdom of Fran Lebowitz

A major aspect of Lebowitz’s appeal as a writer (and, later, as a public speaker) is her pithy, Wildean observations about the world around her, reflecting a stubborn but sophisticated New Yorker persona. Among her most quote-worthy observations are:

• “The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.”
• “Spilling your guts is exactly as charming as it sounds.”
• “There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death.”
• “Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.”
• “You’re only as good as your last haircut.”
• “When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.”
• “Reading is better than life. Without reading, you’re stuck with life.”

Books and “writer’s blockade”

In 1978 a number of Lebowitz’s most popular essays and columns were collected in the book Metropolitan Life, which was soon followed by another collection, Social Studies (1981). Both books were best sellers, and it was not long before Lebowitz signed a publisher’s contract, with a hefty advance, to write a novel called Exterior Signs of Wealth. However, she was gripped by writer’s block, and she never finished the novel. Lebowitz’s decades-long bout of writer’s block became legendary in the publishing industry, and she began jokingly referring to it as a “writer’s blockade” in interviews. She has often spoken about her great fear of writing, explaining to The New York Times, “The act of writing puts you in confrontation with yourself, which is why I think writers assiduously avoid writing.” Yet she continued to publish essays in many magazines. In 1994 she wrote a children’s book, Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet Two Pandas, which is set in New York. That same year her first two books were collected in The Fran Lebowitz Reader.

Lebowitz remained in the public eye through her frequent appearances on television talk shows and as a public speaker, in which she proved herself to be as compelling and witty in her abilities as a raconteur as she is as a writer. In 2008 she appeared at the New York Public Library with her close friend, the novelist Toni Morrison, for a conversation on topics such as history, slavery, racism, humor, and, of course, writing. After Morrison’s death in 2019, Lebowitz often spoke of missing her, going as far as to say, in an interview in 2024 with Sarah Ferguson of ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) News, “I have only ever known one wise person, and that was Toni.”

Law & Order and collaborations with Scorsese

Lebowitz also found a surprising specialty in playing fictional judges, on the TV series Law & Order for six seasons (2001–07) and in the film The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), directed by her friend Martin Scorsese. Lebowitz was the subject of two documentaries by Scorsese: the feature-length Public Speaking (2010) and the miniseries Pretend It’s a City (2021). In these, Lebowitz held forth on subjects such as her childhood, her experiences in New York City in the 1970s, tourists, books and writing, smoking, aging and creativity, laziness (Lebowitz counts herself as among the all-time great sloths), and modern technology, such as cell phones, computers, and the Internet, all of which Lebowitz notoriously scorns. In Public Speaking she also offered pointed observations about straight white male privilege and the devastating impact of AIDS on high culture and New York’s art scene in the 1980s and ’90s. Pretend It’s a City was nominated for an Emmy Award for outstanding documentary or nonfiction series.

Honors

Long regarded as a style icon for her classic attire of blazers, button-down Oxford shirts, jeans, cowboy boots, and tortoiseshell glasses, Lebowitz has often appeared on the best-dressed lists of such magazines as Vanity Fair. In 2021 she received the Foreign Press Honorary Award from the Foreign Press Correspondents Association & Club USA.