George Plimpton and Ernest Hemingway bullfighting, as seen in “American Masters: Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself.” Photo: Courtesy of the Plimpton Estate.

George Plimpton and Papa in Cuba

When Ernest Hemingway agreed to his famous Paris Review interview, he had no idea he’d be helping the CIA.

By Joel WhitneyJanuary 2, 2107

In early 1959, George Plimpton was preparing to watch an execution in Cuba. The Cuban revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, had just marched on Havana and ousted the US-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista. The young Paris Review editor and other New York literary figures arrived during a period marked by hope for a democratic Cuba. They were there, too, as witnesses. Wary of US media distorting events, the revolutionaries had called in writers and intellectuals to witness the changing of the guard.

Fran Lebowitz / A Humorist at Work

Fran Lebowitz

Fran Lebowitz

A Humorist at Work

Interviewed by James Linville 
and George Plimpton

Summer 1993
The Paris Review No. 127

Fran Lebowitz’s trademark is the sneer; she disapproves of virtually everything except sleep, cigarette smoking, and good furniture. Her essays and topical interviews on subjects ranging from the difficulty of finding an acceptable apartment to the art of freeloading at weekend houses have come to be regarded as classics of literary humor and social observation.

Lebowitz was born in 1950 in Morristown, New Jersey, the daughter of furniture store proprietors. While working in the local Carvel ice-cream store, she attended an Episcopalian day school until she was thrown out for “non-specific surliness.” Certain that she would starve to death following this banishment, Lebowitz skipped college and moved to Manhattan, where she pursued such jobs as taxi driving, belt peddling, apartment cleaning (“with a small specialty in Venetian blinds”), and selling advertising space for Changes magazine.

Her first published work, movie and book reviews, appeared in that magazine when she was twenty years old. At twenty-one, she began a column, “I Cover the Waterfront,” for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, before moving toMademoiselle. Lebowitz maintains that she wrote the columns with the intention of building a distinct collection of essays. In placing them in magazines she was merely pursuing her policy of selling a piece of writing as many times as possible. The essays were published in Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981).