It’s rather amazing, when you stop to think about it, how many good biographies we do not have of people who mattered—especially people who spoke to or for the non-progressive section of the populace.

As a Gen X-er with a strange mix of intellectual interests, I have my own idiosyncratic list of bios-that-need-to-be-written. I would bet that you would agree with at least one name on that list: filmmaker John Hughes. 

Well, we’re fixing that. I’m happy to announce that Creed & Culture has signed Robert Dean Lurie to write the bio of Hughes that we need.

Hughes not only gave us such classics as The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Home Alone, and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. He was also something of a stealth defender of the family and the social values that supported that institution. To Hughes, as his close friend P. J. O’Rourke once put it, “Walking across the family room in your stocking feet and stepping on a Lego (ouch!) was the fundamental building block of society.”

Robert Dean Lurie is the perfect person to biographize Hughes. Not only is Robert the author of acclaimed books on R.E.M., The Church, and David Bowie, he also recently re-lived the year 1984—really, he did!—and then wrote about that surreal experience on his superb Substack, to which you really must subscribe. The tagline there is “Music. Books. Spirit.” I love that.

In short, Robert is an expert on the popular and political culture of the era in which Hughes rose to prominence. And he’s an absolutely beautiful writer. It’ll be several years until this Hughes bio sees the light of day, but I can’t wait to read Robert’s manuscript.

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