Lauren Weisberger

Lauren Weisberger (born March 28, 1977) is an American writer and author of the 2003 bestseller The Devil Wears Prada, a roman à clef of her experience as an assistant to Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.

She graduated from Parkland High School in 1995 and attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she was an English major, a sorority member of Alpha Epsilon Phi, and graduated in 1999.

After graduating from Cornell University, Weisberger backpacked through much of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, including Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Jordan, Nepal, and Thailand.

After returning to the United States following her backpacking expedition, Weisberger settled in Manhattan, where she was hired as assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

After ten months, she and Vogue features editor Richard Story left the magazine.

Weisberger said she felt out of place at the magazine, though Vogue managing editor Laurie Jones later said, "She seemed to be a perfectly happy, lovely woman".

Weisberger and Story began working for Departures, an American Express publication, where she wrote 100-word reviews and became an assistant editor.

Weisberger's first book, The Devil Wears Prada, was published by Broadway Books in 2003; it spent six months on The New York Times Best Seller List.

Betts wrote in April 2003.

She also published a 2004 article in Playboy magazine.

After mentioning her interest in writing classes to 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.

Weisberger secured a $1 million advance from Simon & Schuster for her second novel, Everyone Worth Knowing, which based on the trials and tribulations of the New York City public relations world; the book was published in fall 2005.

It received generally unfavorable reviews.

Weisberger worked as a writer and editor for Vogue and Departures magazines prior to authoring The Devil Wears Prada, which was adapted into a film of the same name in 2006.

She has since published seven other novels.

Weisberger was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania to a school teacher mother and a department store president turned mortgage broker father.

Her family is Jewish, and she was raised in Conservative Judaism and later Reform Judaism.

She spent her early youth in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, a small town outside Scranton.

At age eleven, her parents divorced and she and her younger sister moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the Lehigh Valley region of the state, with their mother.

She attended Parkland High School in South Whitehall Township near Allentown, where she was involved in intramural sports, some competitive sports, extra projects, and organizations.

By July 2006, The Devil Wears Prada was the best-selling mass-market softcover book in the nation, according to Publishers Weekly.

The Devil Wears Prada is a semi-fictional but highly critical book on the Manhattan elite, and is largely based on Weisberger's experience at Vogue magazine.

The book's primary character Miranda Priestly is believed to represent Wintour and the fictional Elias-Clark publishing company in the book is believed to be modeled on Condé Nast.

The book focuses on many comical aspects of a first job in the world of elite fashion.

While commercially successful, the book was not well received at Vogue.

Kate Betts, a Vogue editor, criticized Weisberger and the book in The New York Times, writing that Weisberger and Wintour are actually the direct counterparts of their fictional characters.

"Andrea is just as much a snob as the snobs she is thrown in with."

Film rights to The Devil Wears Prada were acquired by 20th Century Fox, which released a movie of the same name in June 2006, starring Meryl Streep (as Miranda Priestly) and Anne Hathaway (as Andrea Sachs).

The film grossed $27.5 million in its opening weekend, and amassed U.S. sales of nearly $125 million and worldwide sales of $326 million, making it one of the top-grossing films of summer 2006.

The film departs from the book in several ways.

For example, in the film, Andrea is a graduate of Northwestern University; in the book, she is a graduate of Brown University.

The film depicts Miranda asking Andrea to accompany her to Paris when a colleague falls ill.

The book, however, has Emily catching mono and being unable to go with Miranda.

In the book, Andrea's best friend Lily is an alcoholic who gets into a car crash, leaving Andrea to decide whether to stay with Miranda in Paris or return to assist her friend.

The movie does not include any of these details and ends with Andrea and Miranda parting in Paris but viewing each other with mutual respect.

In the book, however, Andrea curses Miranda to her face and is consequently fired.

Weisberger made a brief cameo in the film as the twins' nanny.

In October 2006, Fox acquired the television rights to the book, though the series was ultimately never developed.