Writer: John Hughes

John Hughes wrote and often directed the films that defined American adolescence on screen in the 1980s: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful.

The Breakfast Club is the argument in its purest form: five teenagers in a room for a day, with the adult world present only as an antagonist. Hughes took the interior life of a sixteen-year-old seriously at a point when studio comedy did not.

He also wrote Home Alone and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, then withdrew from public life almost entirely in the 1990s while continuing to write under a pseudonym.