Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964) is an American author and screenwriter.

Ellis was one of the 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 (née Dennis), was a homemaker.

They divorced in 1982.

During the initial release of his third novel, American Psycho, Ellis said that his father was abusive and was the basis of the book's best-known character, Patrick Bateman.

Later Ellis said the character was not in fact based on his father, but on Ellis himself, saying that all of his work came from a specific place of pain he was going through in his life during the writing of each of his books.

Ellis says that while his family life growing up was somewhat difficult due to the divorce, he mostly had an "idyllic" California childhood.

Ellis graduated from The Buckley School in Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles.

He then attended Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, where he studied music and then gradually gravitated to writing, which had been one of his passions since childhood.

At Bennington College, he met and befriended Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem, who both later became published writers.

At Bennington College, he also completed his first novel, Less than Zero, which was published while Ellis was 21 and still in college.

When Ellis was 21, his first novel, the controversial bestseller Less than Zero (1985), was published by Simon & Schuster.

After the success and controversy of Less than Zero in 1985, Ellis became closely associated and good friends with fellow Brat Pack writer Jay McInerney: the two became known as the "toxic twins" for their highly publicized late-night debauchery.

Less than Zero was adapted in 1987 as a film of the same name, but the film bore little resemblance to the novel.

His third novel, American Psycho (1991), was his most successful.

Upon its release the literary establishment widely condemned it as overly violent and misogynistic.

Though many petitions to ban the book saw Ellis dropped by Simon & Schuster, the resounding controversy convinced Alfred A. Knopf to release it as a paperback later that year.

Ellis's novels have become increasingly metafictional.

Ellis became a pariah for a time following the release of American Psycho (1991), which later became a critical and cult hit, more so after its 2000 movie adaptation.

It is now regarded as Ellis's magnum opus, garnering acknowledgement from a number of academics.

The Informers (1994) was offered to his publisher during Glamorama's long writing history.

Ellis wrote a screenplay for The Rules of Attraction's film adaptation, which was not used.

Mary Harron's adaptation of American Psycho was released in 2000.

Roger Avary's adaptation of The Rules of Attraction was released in 2002.

Lunar Park (2005), a pseudo-memoir and ghost story, received positive reviews.

He records a fictionalized version of his life story up until this point in the first chapter of Lunar Park (2005).

After the death of his lover Michael Wade Kaplan, Ellis was spurred to finish Lunar Park and inflected it with a new tone of wistfulness.

The Informers, co-written by Ellis and based on his collection of short stories, was released in 2008.

Ellis was approached by young screenwriter Nicholas Jarecki to adapt The Informers into a film; the script they co-wrote was cut from 150 to 94 pages and taken from Jarecki to give to Australian director Gregor Jordan, whose light-on-humor vision of the film met with negative reviews when it was released in 2009.

Despite setbacks as a screenwriter, Ellis teamed up with director Gus Van Sant in 2009 to adapt the Vanity Fair article "The Golden Suicides" into a film of the same name, depicting the paranoid final days and suicides of celebrity artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.

Imperial Bedrooms (2010), marketed as a sequel to Less than Zero, continues in this vein.

The Shards (2023) is a fictionalized memoir of Ellis's final year of high school in 1981 Los Angeles.

Four of Ellis's works have been made into films.

Ellis also wrote the screenplay for the 2013 film The Canyons.

The film, as of 2014, had not been made.

When Van Sant appeared on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast on February 12, 2014, he stated that he was never attached to the project as a screenwriter or a director, merely a consultant, saying that the material seemed too tricky for him to properly render on screen.

Ellis and Van Sant mentioned that Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling were approached to star as Duncan and Blake, respectively.

Ellis confirmed that he and his producing partner Braxton Pope were still working on the project, with Ellis revisiting the screenplay from time to time.