Hefner, Hugh (Marston)

(born April 9, 1926, Chicago, Ill., U.S.) U.S. magazine publisher and entrepreneur. After serving in the U.S. Army (1944–46), he attended the University of Illinois, graduating in 1949. In 1953 he founded Playboy, a magazine for men. Playboy's intellectually respectable articles and its forthright philosophy of hedonism made it a seminal influence on the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. Hefner later expanded his enterprise into nightclubs and other entertainment media.

Hefner, Hugh (Marston) (1926– ) publisher, entrepreneur; born in Chicago. Brought up by straitlaced parents, he did postgraduate work in psychology and, after working at Esquire magazine, gathered $10,000 capital to found Playboy (1953), a sophisticated erotic magazine for men that offered articles of high standards, along with advice on sexual problems, men's talk, and a nude "Playmate of the Month" centerfold. With a boost from the sexual revolution, Playboy flourished, enabling Hefner to live a playboy-style life in an opulent Chicago mansion; later he transferred his hedonistic menage to Los Angeles. He also founded a chain of restaurant-nightclubs featuring scantily uniformed Playboy "bunnies" as waitresses. By the mid-1980s his clubs and publishing empire began to decline, and when he finally married a former "playmate" in 1989, it appeared the Hefner revolution had ended.