Dispatch

How They Lived

By Mark Horowitz

Image credit: Library of Congress

John Hughes (b. 1950) was the Truffaut of teendom. In Hollywood, a factory town, he was able to author distinctive, personal work, directing eight films in the ’80s—including The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink—that became touchstones for practically every suburban white kid of the era. The Hughes machine (he also wrote close to 30 films) abruptly shut down in 1994, when Hughes quit the business at the age of 44. The result was a peculiarly truncated career—now you see him, now you don’t—but the adults whose adolescence he helped define certainly won’t forget about him.