Arthur Lubow (born September 18, 1952) is an American journalist who has written for national magazines since 1975 and is the author of Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer (2016).

Lubow grew up in the Bronx and attended the Bronx High School of Science. At Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1974, he was managing editor of The Harvard Crimson. He studied at Cambridge University on a Knox Fellowship from autumn 1974 to spring 1975.

Lubow began his career as a staff writer for New Times, a now defunct general interest biweekly; he wrote there about a wide array of subjects, including New German cinema, genetic engineering and President Ford’s environmental policy.

He was a senior writer at People from 1981 to 1985, where his profile subjects included Oliver Sacks, John Travolta, Paul Theroux, Brian Eno and Pauline Kael.

A contributing editor at Vanity Fair from 1985 to 1987, he mainly wrote stories on writers, including Gay Talese, Gore Vidal and Stephen Hawking.

When Tina Brown left Vanity Fair as the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair for The New Yorker, he was part of a small group of writers asked to accompany her. He worked as a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1992 to 1993, and continued thereafter to contribute to the magazine as a freelancer, on subjects that include the playwright Tony Kushner, biographical film projects on Jackson Pollock, and the creation of an advertising campaign for Stolichnaya vodka.

From 2002 to 2014, Lubow was a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, writing mainly on cultural topics, including the artist Takashi Murakami, the chef Ferran Adria, the conductors Valery Gergiev and Gustavo Dudamel, the composer Arvo Part, the photographer Jeff Wall, the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, the architects Rem Koolhaas, Thom Mayne, Jean Nouvel and SANAA, and the battle between Yale University and Peru over artifacts from Machu Picchu.

He has also written frequently for Smithsonian, Departures, W and The Threepenny Review.