Revenge Wears Prada (Weisberger)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 28, 1977
• Raised—Scranton and Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Cornell University
• Currently—lives in New York City


Lauren Weisberger is the American author of six novels. She is best known for her 2003 bestseller The Devil Wears Prada, a speculated roman a clef of her real life experience as a put-upon assistant to Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.

Early life and education
Weisberger was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a school teacher mother and a department-store-president turned mortgage-broker father. Weisberger was raised in Conservative Judaism and later Reform Judaism. She spent her early youth in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, a small town outside Scranton. At 11, her parents divorced and she and her younger sister, Dana, moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the Lehigh Valley region of the state, with their mother.

At Parkland High School, in South Whitehall Township near Allentown, Weisberger was involved in intramural sports, some competitive sports, extra projects, and organizations. She graduated in 1995. She attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she was an English major, graduating in 1999.

After college, she traveled as a backpacker through Europe, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Thailand, India, Nepal, and Hong Kong. Returning home, she moved to Manhattan and was hired as Wintour's assistant at Vogue. She was there for ten months before leaving along with features editor Richard Story. While Weisberger said she felt out of place at the magazine, managing editor Laurie Jones later said, "She seemed to be a perfectly happy, lovely woman".

Weisberger and Story began working for Departures Magazine, an American Express publication, where she wrote 100-word reviews and became an assistant editor. She also published a 2004 article in Playboy magazine.

After mentioning her interest in writing classes to her boss, Richard Story, he referred her to his friend Charles Salzberg. She started writing a story about her time at Vogue, and completed it by trying to write 15 pages every couple of weeks. After repeated urgings, she showed the finished work to agents; it sold within two weeks.

Novels
In 2003, Weisberger's first book, The Devil Wears Prada, was released and spent six months on the New York Times Best Seller List. The book is a semi-fictional but highly critical view of the Manhattan elite. As of July 2006, The Devil Wears Prada was the best-selling mass-market softcover book in the nation, according to Publishers Weekly. The book is largely based on Weisberger's experience at Vogue. There is much speculation that the character of Miranda Priestly represents aspects of Anna Wintour. The fictional Elias-Clark publishing company is said to be modeled after Condé Nast.

The book calls into light the many aspects of one's first job. It also highlights the presumed insanity of the fashion world and the difficulty and pressure a person goes through when trying to balance a demanding job with an adequate social life. The book provides a comical insight into the fashion world. While this book was met with stunning success, one former employee of Anna Wintour, Kate Betts, criticized Weisberger and the book in The New York Times, saying that Weisberger and Wintour are the direct counterparts of their fictional characters and that "Andrea ... is just as much a snob as the snobs she is thrown in with." In 2013 Weisberger published a sequel of the book:  Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns.

Weisberger's second novel, Everyone Worth Knowing, was published in fall of 2005 and is based upon the trials and tribulations of the New York City public relations world. It received generally unfavorable reviews. Despite debuting on the New York Times Best Sellers List at No. 10, it dropped off the list in two weeks and was noted for its disappointing sales.

Chasing Harry Winston is Weisberger's third novel, released in 2008. The main characters are three best friend New Yorkers facing the horror of turning 30. The book was panned by critics and was voted "#1 Worst Book of 2008" by Entertainment Weekly.

Last Night at Chateau Marmont was released in 2010 and debuted at No. 9 on the New York Times Bestseller List on September 5, 2010

Revenge Wears Prada, a sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, was released in 2013. It debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times Bestseller List. Weisbeger's sixth book came out in 2016: The Singles Game, a look at the highstakes world of professional tennis.

Short Stories
Her short story "The Bamboo Confessions" is included in the anthology American Girls About Town. It is about a New York City backpacker who travels around the world and begins to view her love life back home in a different light. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/11/2013.)