Bret Easton Ellis

After his debut in 1985 with the novel Less Than Zero, American writer Bret Easton Ellis was declared by many critics as the “voice of a generation.” Ellis’s darkly sardonic first novel captured the jaded nihilism of the emerging Generation X, and he soon became famous as a member of the so-called “Literary Brat Pack”—a group of up-and-coming American authors in the 1980s and early ’90s that included Jay McInerney and Donna Tartt. Since then, Ellis has continued to produce starkly disturbing satirical works that criticize the endless greed of upper-class society, populating his novels with caricatures of financially wealthy but morally bankrupt elites. The best-known, and most notorious, of these works is his third novel, the extremely graphic serial-killer satire American Psycho (1991).

Childhood

Ellis was born into an upper-middle-class family in Los Angeles and raised in the neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, California. His mother, Dale (née Dennis) Ellis, was a homemaker. His father, Robert Martin Ellis, was a property developer who was abusive to his family and died at age 50 as a result of his alcoholism. He has also been the inspiration for many of Ellis’s violent and narcissistic characters. In 2010 Ellis told The Guardian, “If you’re a dude and you’re super-successful, the chances are you have something to prove to Daddy.…Would I have become an artist without my father’s influence? No, I probably wouldn’t.”

His parents were big readers, as was Ellis, who began writing from the time he was five or six years old. The works of Ernest Hemingway and Joan Didion were important discoveries for him as both a reader and a writer. In 2024 he told November magazine, “When I found out that Hemingway had been [Didion’s] favorite writer and her mentor in a way, it made sense that these two writers fused together and changed my way of writing.”

From the Buckley School to Bennington College

Ellis attended the Buckley School, an elite private K–12 school. When he was a teenager he wrote his first novels, one of which he describes as “just really me inserting myself into Joan Didion essays.” These were never published, but another manuscript that he began working on while at Buckley, a semiautobiographical work titled Less Than Zero (for an Elvis Costello song), would have a different fate and soon make his reputation in the literary world.

After graduating from Buckley in 1982, Ellis attended Bennington College in Vermont. His original intent was to study music, but he ultimately chose to focus on his writing. At college he took courses taught by Joe McGinniss (author of such works as the 1969 bestseller The Selling of the President, 1968), and he befriended Donna Tartt, Jonathan Lethem, and Jill Eisenstadt, fellow students who were also aspiring writers.

Less Than Zero

At Bennington Ellis completed Less Than Zero, excerpts of which McGinniss had shared with an editor at Simon & Schuster publishing house. The novel was published in 1985 while Ellis was in his junior year of college. Less Than Zero is a postmodern work about privileged but disaffected Los Angeles teenagers whose world revolves around sex, drugs, and MTV. The novel’s lack of a plot mimics its characters’ lack of direction, which is portrayed as resulting from growing up with too much money and no real challenges.

The book propelled Ellis to literary stardom. Within two years it had sold 70,000 hardcover copies and 200,000 paperbacks. In 1987 Less Than Zero was adapted into a major motion picture starring Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz, James Spader, and Robert Downey, Jr. However, the movie toned down some of the story’s edgier aspects, and Ellis later complained about the movie’s “earnestness and yearning to be likable and relatable.” The novel itself remained influential long after its release; in a 2019 essay published in The Guardian, writer Ottessa Moshfegh praised its “hard truth.”

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Literary stardom

Ellis’s debut came at a time when many publishers were beginning to court fresh new voices. Ellis quickly became associated with a group of fellow young writers whom the media dubbed the Literary Brat Pack. Among those who were lumped into this group were Ellis’s Bennington friends Tartt and Eisenstadt as well as novelists Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz. In particular, Ellis, McInerney, and Janowitz gained a reputation for frequent partying, and gossip columns were only too happy to report on how much the hot young writers’ lifestyles reflected the decadence of the 1980s that they documented in their writings.

After graduating from Bennington in 1986, Ellis relocated to New York City and published his second book, The Rules of Attraction (1987). Featuring experimental narrative choices including a blank chapter and another written in French, the novel follows a group of students at a Bennington-like college. It received much less fanfare than his debut, despite earning praise from such literary lions as Gore Vidal.

American Psycho

In 1991 Ellis published what many fans and critics consider to be his magnum opus, American Psycho. The book is written in the first person from the perspective of an affectless psychopath named Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street investor by day and a hedonistic serial killer by night. Interspersed between this narrative are three chapters in which Bateman reviews, in the manner of a Rolling Stone article, the music of his favorite pop artists: Huey Lewis and the News, Phil Collins, and Whitney Houston. On its surface American Psycho is a graphically violent horror tale, but it is also a satire aimed at the depravity and lack of empathy of America’s wealthiest elites. Before it was even published, the shocking content caused the original publisher, Simon & Schuster, to drop the book; Vintage, an imprint of Random House, then picked up the publishing rights.

The book sparked an outcry from feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women, who were concerned that it would encourage violence against women. It also had its defenders, such as British writer Fay Weldon, who called it “a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel which revolves about its own nasty bits.” Ellis and his editor at Vintage received death threats. The author responded to the outrage in an interview with The New York Times: “I had no idea the novel would provoke the reception it’s gotten, and I still don’t quite get it. But then I was not trying to add members to my fan club. You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you.”

American Psycho was adapted into a movie in 2000, directed by Mary Harron and starring Christian Bale as Bateman. Despite being only a modest success in theaters, the film became a cult classic. In 2024 Harron observed of the book’s notoriety: “There was a big scandal [when it was published] and I was really surprised that in all the furor, no one said that the book was really funny. As well as being very violent, it was a great Evelyn Waugh-style social satire.”

Ellis has discussed his polarizing book at length in the years since its release, revealing that his father was a model for Patrick Bateman. However, in 2019 he wrote that “it primarily was a novel that expressed my personal pain when I was struggling and failing to accept adulthood in those lost yuppie years of the late 1980s.”

Later novels

Ellis followed up American Psycho with The Informers (1994) and Glamorama (1998), the latter of which is a parody of celebrity culture centering on a male model who becomes involved in the world of terrorism and surveillance. By contrast, the metafictional novel Lunar Park (2005), which features a fictionalized version of Ellis as a drugged-out writer trying to achieve redemption by reconnecting with his family, is an introspective postmodern visage. The book is dedicated to Ellis’s father. Imperial Bedrooms (2010) is a sequel to Less Than Zero, taking place decades later as the characters face middle age and deal with the consequences of the hedonism of their youth.

Hollywood career

Ellis then expanded his writing oeuvre to write the screenplays for several movies, including the drama The Canyons (2013), which starred Lindsay Lohan, and the horror thriller The Curse of Downers Grove (2015). Ellis also served as both writer and director of the television series The Deleted (2016).

Cultural provocateur

In the 21st century Ellis became an outspoken cultural provocateur on social media, especially on X (formerly Twitter), and on his podcast The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast (2013– ). His iconoclastic opinions have frequently drawn ire. In 2013 he was barred from attending the GLAAD Media Awards after he posted controversial tweets about the TV show Glee and objecting to the proposed casting of Matt Bomer, an openly gay actor, as the straight male lead in the film Fifty Shades of Grey. Ellis responded to being barred by tweeting, “As a gay man in a domestic partnership who plans to get married I’m sad to hear I’ve been banned by Glaad from attending tomorrow’s event. Glaad is supposedly ‘furious’ about my tweets. And I’m guessing not the ones concerning my boyfriend or how sexy I think Adam Driver is.”

In 2019 Ellis published White, a collection of essays offering reflections on his experiences in Hollywood and opinions on a wide range of topics, including cancel culture, celebrities such as Kanye West and Tom Cruise, the reaction of liberals to the presidency of Donald Trump, and the perceived differences between Gen X and millennials. The last of these topics was one that Ellis often broached. In 2023 he told Unherd, “I think part of the reason why Gen X is the most conservative of the generations—much more than boomers, much more than millennials—is that we had the most freedom [as children]. We looked to be shocked. We wanted to be offended.”

The Shards

In 2023 Ellis published his first novel in 13 years. The Shards is another metafictional work that centers on a character named Bret Easton Ellis who becomes the target of a serial killer while in his senior year of an elite private school in Los Angeles. Critics called it Ellis’s strongest work in decades, praising it as both an effectively schlocky horror novel and an affectionately nostalgic look at the early 1980s.