A member of the literary "brat pack" of the '80s, McInerney shot to fame with his novel Bright Lights, Big City. He's married to Anne Hearst.

Raised in Connecticut, McInerney attended Williams College before landing a job in the fact-checking department at The New Yorker in the early '80s. While there he made his literary debut with 1984's Bright Lights, Big City, a chronicle of cocaine-saturated '80s urban hedonism that quickly made him part of the so-called "brat pack"—a group that also included Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz—and established his rep as a nightclubbing lothario. McInerney's gone on to pen nearly a dozen novels and collections of essays about wine, but none have matched the success of his debut. A symbol of the wild excess of the 1980s, McInerney has long struggled to gain respect as a writer. (He was once described as "Dan Quayle of the American publishing scene.") In recent years, he's desperately tried to distance himself from his previous image, that of a "coke-snorting, modelizing, nightclubbing bad boy." In the process, he's managed to turn himself into the sort of person his younger self would have relentlessly mocked: He wrote about overpriced wine and food as a contributing editor to House & Garden until the magazine folded in late 2007, and is married to an A-list socialite/heiress, Anne Hearst. [Image via Getty]