Frances Ann Lebowitz is an American author, public speaker, and occasional actor. She is known for her sardonic social commentary on American life as filtered through her New York City sensibilities. The New York Times has called her a modern-day Dorothy Parker. She is known for her books Metropolitan Life and Social Studies, which were combined into The Fran Lebowitz Reader in 1994. She has been the subject of two projects directed by Martin Scorsese, the HBO documentary film Public Speaking, and the Netflix docu-series Pretend It's a City.