American · b. 1964
Bret Easton Ellis is an American novelist and screenwriter born in Los Angeles in 1964. He published his first novel, Less Than Zero, in 1985 while still a student at Bennington College. The book follows rich, drug-numbed Los Angeles teenagers and made him a young literary celebrity. He followed it with The Rules of Attraction in 1987 and American Psycho in 1991, a violent satire narrated by a Wall Street killer that caused public protests and was dropped by its first publisher before Vintage released it. Later books include Glamorama, Lunar Park, Imperial Bedrooms and The Shards, a 2023 novel set in his senior year of high school. Several of his novels have been adapted into films, and American Psycho became a cult film and a stage musical. He also wrote the screenplay for The Canyons and hosts a podcast. His flat, deadpan prose on wealth, boredom and violence made him a defining and divisive voice of American fiction since the 1980s.