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).

Biography

He was born in Los Angeles and raised in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley, the son of Robert Martin Ellis, a wealthy property developer, and Dale Ellis, a housewife. His parents divorced in 1982. He was educated at Buckley High School, where he did not distinguish himself, and then took a music-based course at Bennington College in Vermont, which is thinly disguised as Camden Arts College in his novel The Rules Of Attraction. He was a part-time musician in some minor 1980s bands, such as The Parents, before his first book was published while he was still a student. Less Than Zero, a tale of disaffected, rich teenagers of Los Angeles, was well received by the critics and sold respectably (50,000 copies in its first year). He moved to New York in 1987 to release his second novel.

Related Topics:
Sherman Oaks - San Fernando Valley - Bennington College - Vermont - The Rules Of Attraction - Less Than Zero - New York - 1987

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His most controversial work, the graphically violent novel American Psycho, was intended to be published by Simon & Schuster but they withdrew after external protests (NOW, and many others, considered the novel dangerously misogynistic and worse) and pressure from Gulf & Western. The novel was later published by Vintage. Some consider this novel, whose protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is both a cartoonishly materialistic yuppie and a serial killer, to be an example of transgressive art. American Psycho has achieved considerable cult status.

Related Topics:
American Psycho - Simon & Schuster - NOW - Misogynistic - Gulf & Western - Vintage - Protagonist - Patrick Bateman - Yuppie - Serial killer - Transgressive art

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