Bret Easton Ellis

American · born 1964

Born Bret Easton Ellis on March 7, 1964, in Los Angeles, California, and raised in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Sherman Oaks, the son of Robert Martin Ellis, a property developer, and Dale Ellis, a homemaker; his parents divorced when he was eighteen. He graduated from the Buckley School and enrolled at Bennington College in Vermont in 1982, where he studied music before turning to fiction and became close with fellow students Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem. Still an undergraduate, he published Less Than Zero (1985) at twenty-one, a flat, drugged account of wealthy Los Angeles teenagers that made him, alongside Jay McInerney, one of the so-called Literary Brat Pack and an early chronicler of a jaded new generation. The Rules of Attraction (1987) returned to the fictional Camden College, modeled on Bennington itself. His third novel, American Psycho, was set to appear from Simon and Schuster in 1991 until the publisher dropped it three months before release over its graphic violence; Ellis kept the $300,000 advance, and Sonny Mehta signed the book to Vintage two days later for an additional $350,000. Its publication brought protests, a brief removal from the New York Times bestseller list, and death threats against both Ellis and Mehta, before the novel settled into its place as the book most identified with his name. He followed it with The Informers (1994), a linked story collection, Glamorama (1998), and Lunar Park (2005), a metafictional haunted-house novel dedicated to his father, who died in 1992, and to his partner, Michael Wade Kaplan, who died shortly before its completion. Imperial Bedrooms (2010) revisited the characters of Less Than Zero two decades on. Ellis publicly identified as gay in a 2012 Daily Beast column, and the following year launched The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast. He has also written screenplays, including The Canyons (2013) and Smiley Face Killers (2020). The Shards (2023), a fictionalized memoir of his final year of high school, was his first novel in thirteen years. He lives in Los Angeles.