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Fran Lebowitz — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Early life and education

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.

Later career

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."

Due to her writer's block, Lebowitz has largely supported herself with television appearances and speaking engagements. She has said, "It's what I wanted my entire life. People asking me my opinion, and people not allowed to interrupt." She tours as a public speaker, represented by the Steven Barclay Agency. In addition, she has made several appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and had a recurring role as Judge Janice Goldberg on the television drama Law & Order from 2001 to 2007. She does still write journalistic pieces; Lebowitz has been employed as a contributing editor and occasional columnist for Vanity Fair since 1997.

In 2010, Lebowitz was introduced to a new generation of audiences, when she was featured in the Public Speaking, an HBO documentary about her directed by Martin Scorsese that contains interviews and clips from her speaking engagements. On November 17, 2010, she returned to the Late Show with David Letterman after a 16-year absence to promote the documentary. She discussed her years-long writer's block, which she jokingly called a "writer's blockade". Lebowitz also made an appearance as a judge in Scorsese's 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street. She collaborated with Scorsese again on the 2021 Netflix series Pretend It's a City, in which Scorsese interviews her about New York City and other subjects.

In May 2026, Lebowitz undertook a speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand, appearing at the Adelaide Festival Centre in Adelaide with Louise Adler.

New York City

Lebowitz has been critical of the gentrification and changing culture of New York City. She explained that the main difference between "Old New York" and "New New York" is the influence and dominance of the culture of money. While New York was always an expensive city, people who were not rich could live in Manhattan and "you didn't have to think about money every second." This was because, among other reasons, "there were a zillion bad jobs. That doesn't exist any more. I mean, I could wake up one afternoon with zero money—I don't just mean in the house, I mean to my name—and know that by the end of the day, I would have money."

She has been critical of New York mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg for making New York more "suburban" and accelerating gentrification in Manhattan. She has also been critical of the large numbers of wealthy people in New York City, as she believes they do not create anything of value but only consume things. Of Bloomberg, she said:

I object to people who are rich in politics. I don't think they should be allowed to be in politics. It is bad that rich people are in politics, it is bad for everybody but rich people, and rich people don't need any more help. Whenever people say, "Oh, he earned his money himself," I always say the same thing: "No one earns a billion dollars. People earn $10 an hour, people steal a billion dollars."

Of Giuliani's law enforcement policies she said, "When Giuliani was the mayor, every five minutes an unarmed black man was shot in the back." Lebowitz abhors New York City's high number of tourists, calling the shift in the 1980s toward promoting the city as a tourist destination "an incredibly horrible idea". She has cited tourism as a cause of New York's housing shortage because hotels are built rather than apartment buildings, and described the negative effects of gearing the city's economy towards tourists: "You cannot lure these herds of hillbillies into the middle of a city, and not have it affect the city."

Of the homelessness crisis in New York, she has said, "Any New Yorker who walks down the street in this rich city ... you can't even hear anything because the money's making so much noise now, and see people in the street and not feel this is a disgrace to the country, it's a disgrace to the city."

Politics

Lebowitz identifies as a liberal Democrat and is often critical of moderate Democratic politicians and policy. She has been a vociferous critic of the Republican Party for many years and more recently of President Donald Trump. She has said that Trump's appeal to his voters is "racism, pure and simple", and described Trump campaign rallies as reminiscent of those held by the Ku Klux Klan and George Wallace. She has called Trump "a cheap hustler", "stupid", "lazy", and "a little crazy, but mostly he's dumb". Of Trump's election in 2016, she said, "It was horrible. I felt that strongly affected emotionally for at least a month. My level of rage, always high, is now in fever pitch all the time." She joked, "If there's one upside to all this [Trump's election], it's that it's gotten Trump out of New York."

Lebowitz has been critical of many other politicians. She has expressed antipathy for Bill Clinton's presidency for moving the Democratic Party to the right, saying, "to me he seemed like a Republican...when he signed that welfare bill I went insane. He was a successful moderate Republican president." Lebowitz has spoken of her dislike for Bernie Sanders, calling him at one point "an unbelievably irritating, narcissistic old man" who took votes away from her candidate of choice, Hillary Clinton. She often describes Ronald Reagan as "the template for the stupid President," saying that "before Reagan there was no idea the president could be stupid."

Lebowitz has said she believes the Second Amendment has been misinterpreted, and guarantees individuals the right not to bear arms but rather to form militias. Of the gun rights debate, she has said:

Who are these people that love guns? These people who love Trump and they love guns, these are the most frightened people I have ever seen in my life ... I could have gotten a gun but I never got one. I was an 18-year-old penniless girl in the middle of a dangerous city and I was never as afraid as these men in Texas, living in a state of terror.

In May 2019, Lebowitz jokingly suggested on Real Time with Bill Maher that Trump should suffer the same fate as Jamal Khashoggi, The Washington Post columnist who the CIA and multiple other intelligence agencies believe was tortured and assassinated by Saudi operatives on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's orders. She walked back her comments later in the program.

Lebowitz voted for Zohran Mamdani in the 2025 New York City mayoral election.