Steven Gaines is the best selling author of 12 books, including Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons; The Sky’s the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan; The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of the Beatles; and Marjoe, the biography of evangelist Marjoe Gortner.

"Fool's Paradise: Players, Poseurs and the Culture of Excess in South Beach"  was published by Crown in 2009.

The film version of Gaines' biography about the fashion designer Halston, Simply Halston, is in pre-production with Killer Films starring actor Brendan Fraser.  

Gaines is a contributing editor at New York Magazine and his journalism has appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Observer, the New York Times, Los Angeles, Worth, and Connoisseur. Since 2003 Gaines has hosted a weekly live radio roundtable interview show from the Hamptons called "Sunday Brunch Live from the American Hotel in Sag Harbor" that airs from Memorial Weekend to Labor Day on WLIU FM Southampton, New York, the National Public Radio affiliate on Long Island.

Gaines was born in Brooklyn, New York and attended Erasmus Hall High School and New York University.  He began his journalism career as the "Top of the Pop" columnist for the New York Daily News. In the early part of his career he wrote several books about the music business, including Alice Cooper's autobiography, "Me, Alice", before briefly switching his focus to fashion designers with biographies on Halston and Calvin Klein. 

In 1980 he published a controversial "roman a clef" called The Club about the nightclub Studio 54 that he co-wrote with a 21 year-old Studio 54 bartender, Robert Jon Cohen, for which he was hounded out of New York and forced to move to Laguna Beach.

As Robert Granit, he published "Another Runner in the Night" in 1981, a novel about a homosexual film producer married to the daughter of a studio boss. He is credited with coining the phrase "velvet mafia" in reference to the influential gay crowd who ran Hollywood and the fashion industry.

Gaines is best known for his 1998 social and cultural history of the East End of Long Island called Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons.

In 1993 he co-founded the Hamptons International Film Festival.

He lives on the East End of Long Island with his dog Shepsil.