Jay McInerney Biography

American writer, born in Hartford, Connecticut, educated at Williams College and Syracuse University. His first novel, Bright Light, Big City (1983), dealing with the decadent habits of a group of middle-class New Yorkers, initiated a trend in American fiction of the early 1980s, which was characterized by a certain metropolitan brittleness, sexual cynicism, and a concern with the conspicuous consumerism of the Reagan years; McInerney also wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation. Ransom (1985) is about an American expatriate in Japan, and Story of My Life (1988) returns to a New York setting and a cast of somewhat jaded Bright Young Things. The more ambitious in scope Brightness Falls (1992), set in New York in the 1980s, concerns a group of ambitious young professionals including Russell Calloway, a publisher who becomes embroiled in financial difficulties; his wife, Corinne, a high-flying business-woman torn between the demands of her career and her longing to have a child; and Jeff Pierce, a successful writer who seems intent on destroying himself with drugs. The novel offers a jaundiced view of contemporary American society, which emerges as morally bankrupt and obsessed with material gain. McInerney edited Cowboys, Indians and Commuters (1994), a collection of short stories on modern American life by various writers.