Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964 in Los Angeles, California) is an American author. He is considered to be one of the major Generation X authors. His novels feature "flat affect" and a glossy, empty style which garner him extremely polarized reviews. Ellis has been described as "a profoundly moral writer characteristically spare and hypnotic prose style which beats out these lives of quiet desperation with a slow pulse as gentle as it is compelling" (Modern Review). He has called himself a moralist, while he has been pegged as a nihilist. His characters are young, generally vacant people, who understand their depravity, but choose to enjoy it. Ellis prefers to set his novels in the 1980s to use the overt commercialism of the entertainment industry of the decade as a symbol. The novels are also linked by common, recurring characters, and dystopic locales (Los Angeles, New York).

Bibliography

• Less Than Zero (1985)
• The Rules of Attraction (1987)
• American Psycho (1991)
• The Informers (linked short stories, 1994)
• Glamorama (1998)
• Lunar Park (2005)