Lauren Weisberger

Lauren Weisberger (born March 28, 1977 in Scranton, Pennsylvania) is a Jewish American novelist and author of the 2003 bestseller The Devil Wears Prada, a speculated roman à clef of her time as a put-upon assistant to Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.

Weisberger's mother was a school teacher and her father a department-store-president turned mortgage-broker. She spent her early youth in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, a small town outside Scranton. At age 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.

In 1995, she graduated from Allentown's Parkland High School. During her time at Parkland, Weisberger was involved in various activities, including intramural sports, some competitive sports, extra projects, and organizations.

Following her graduation from high school, she attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she was an English major and a sorority member of Alpha Epsilon Phi. She graduated from Cornell in 1999, with a Bachelor's Degree in English.

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 Storey. While she herself said she felt out of place there, the magazine's managing editor, Laurie Jones, said "she seemed to be a perfectly happy, lovely woman".

After leaving the fashion magazine, she wrote 100-word reviews for Departures Magazine, an American Express publication, before writing her first novel. She also published an article in Playboy magazine in 2004.

Her success came really from her stint at Departures Magazine working as an assistant editor. After mentioning her interest in writing classes to her boss, Richard Story, he referred her to his long esteemed friend, Charles Salzberg. She started writing a story about her time at Vogue, trying to get done fifteen pages every couple of weeks. After continuous nudging for her to show her completed writing to agents, she finally did and within two weeks, it was sold.

Weisberger resides currently in New York City.