Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis is an American author, screenwriter, short-story writer, and director. Ellis was first regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack and is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique, as a writer, is the expression of extreme acts and opinions in an affectless style. His novels commonly share recurring characters. Ellis was born in Los Angeles in 1964, and raised in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley. His father, Robert Martin Ellis, was a property developer, and his mother, Dale Ellis (nee Dennis), was a homemaker. They divorced in 1982. Ellis's first novel, Less than Zero, is a tale of disaffected, rich teenagers of Los Angeles written and rewritten over a five-year period from Ellis's second year in high school, earlier drafts being "... more autobiographical and read like teen diaries or journal entries—lots of stuff about the bands I liked, the beach, the Galleria, clubs, driving around, doing drugs, partying", according to Ellis. The novel was praised by critics and sold well, 50,000 copies in its first year. He moved back to New York City in 1987 for the publication of his second novel, The Rules of Attraction—described by Ellis as "an attempt to write the kind of college novel I had always wanted to read and could never find"[36]—which follows a group of sexually promiscuous college students. Influenced heavily by James Joyce's Ulysses and its stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, the book sold fairly well, though Ellis admits he felt he had "fallen off" after the novel failed to match the success of his debut effort,