John Hughes, one of America’s great film directors and a man who throughout the eighties imbued the American teen with heart and humanity has died recently of a heart attack while walking through Manhattan’s west side.

A great champion and sympathizer of all things youthful, irreverent, adolescent and bittersweet, Hughes helped the young people of their 80s understand themselves by casting teenagers in movie roles that were not just funny, but nuanced and dramatic. Though Hughes was involved in the production of over 40 films during his 20 years in the movie industry, he will be best remembered for dealing with the joy and confusion of being a high school student, a topic he touched upon with a unique and intuitive empathy. Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off were all masterful reflections of the styles and attitudes of the time— from the preposterous clothes and hair styles to the music he carefully chose, they endure as milestones.

Born in Lansing, Michigan, a medium sized city in the America’s industrial mid-west, Hughes’ life before Hollywood was similar in many ways to characters he would later become famous for creating, a fact which no doubt helped him create such authentic portraits of American life. Marrying his high school sweetheart, Norma Jean at the tender age of 20, Hughes’ struggled as a writer for the venerable National Lampoon, a magazine that helped launch the careers of other iconic comedians as Bill Murphy and Chevy Chase. When the National Lampoon asked him to script their first attempts at a film, Hughes found his foot in the door of the film industry. Soon after the success of these early movies, Hughes made his directorial debut with Sixteen Candles, the poignantly funny story of a girl whose 16th birthday gets lost in the shuffle of her bigger sister’s wedding preparations.

The film, which was an immediate critical and commercial success led the way for his myriad later successes, amongst them the tale of a impishly clever truant who drags his best friend and girlfriend on one-man party through Chicago (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and a brooding meditation on alienation and the power of peer-pressure (The Breakfast Club), both of which helped him earn an undisputed position as one of the greatest filmmakers of the era. Despite this beloved status, Hughes eventually shunned the spotlight and glamour of Hollywood, and quietly retired to a working farm in rural America to lead a peaceful life far from the excess and egotism of the film industry.

One of the positive facets of a decade that otherwise might have been characterized by crass commercialism and Ronald Reagan, John Hughes helped make the eighties bearable. Though young filmmakers such as Wes Anderson and Judd Apatow continue to work from a similar palette, neither of them possesses the exact proportions of charm, honesty, wit and delicacy that characterized Hughes in his prime. Luckily his films remain, always there to offer us the solace of a few goods laughs and a blast of great synth-pop when things here in the 21st get too heavy.